Grillo's Fans Will Finally Be Able To Drink The Cult-Favorite Pickles (And Get Buzzed Doing It)

Grillo's just so happens to be our favorite pickle brand, and it doesn't hurt that the company knows how to maximize its popularity by teaming up with other businesses, either. Although Grillo's Crocs are yet to be a thing as far as we're aware, last summer saw a Grillo's Pickles and Sonic collab menu featuring a margarita-ish reboot of the notorious 2018 pickle slush. This year, we're getting Grillo's-flavored Pabst Blue Ribbon.

The beer will be available beginning on May 4, and it will be sold nationwide at supermarkets (such as Walmart and Safeway), convenience stores, including Kwik Trip, and liquor stores like Total Wine. Among the promotions set for this 4.7% ABV lager is a NASCAR racecar painted with a Grillo's PBR logo. If you're a Grillo's superfan, want to add to your PBR can collection, or merely find the product intriguing, you may need to act fast if you want to try this new beer. It's a limited-time product, so once it sells out, you might not see it again.

Grillo's Pickle Beer makes for a fun pre-summer drop, but its main appeal may be to brand name loyalists. The concept is hardly a unique one, as there is a plethora of pickle beers already on the market. To name but a few, there are Donna's Pickle Beer, Infusion Pickle Slam Pickle Lager, Martin House Best Maid Sour Pickle Beer, and Zipline Brewing Company Pickle Time. While none of these beers may have the big brand cred of either Grillo's or PBR, they should have a somewhat similar flavor profile.

So why mix pickles with beer, anyway? Pairing a pickle spear with a glass of beer seems to have been a niche practice less than a decade ago, and following a pickleback shot with a beer makes quite a bit of sense. But in 2019, Pittsburgh's East End Brewing partnered with the Primanti Brothers sandwich chain and came up with a product called Almost Famous Pickle Beer. This opened up the floodgates, and now briny beers are quite the trend because beer drinkers have discovered that salty-sour pickle flavors actually play quite nicely with the mild bitterness of a lager. 

Wisconsin's Oliphant Brewery is even adding some sweetness with a strawberry-flavored pickle beer, which makes us wonder if other interesting flavor combinations are in store — peanut butter pickle beer, perhaps, or Kool-Aid pickle beer? Maybe even Sonic slush pickle beer could be the perfect idea for Grillo's next attention-catching brand collaboration.