Dozens of Hillsborough residents and visitors alike lined up Saturday afternoon to grab beer in the parking lot behind the Wooden Nickel Pub. A few minutes after people got their carefully portioned brews in specially-designed glasses, they raised them to the sky in a toast to the day’s celebration.
Around the world, at roughly the same time, thousands of other beer lovers did the same.
The gathering was part of Zwanze Day, a bi-annual celebration led by the Belgian brewery Cantillon, which holds the reputation of crafting the world’s best sour beers using a Lambic method. After creating an exclusive Zwanze Day brew, the century-old business then partners with dozens of other taprooms, bars and pubs across the globe to share and welcome people in to celebrate together.
The Wooden Nickel Pub in Hillsborough was the lone North Carolina-based spot to receive Cantillon’s 2026 Zwanze Day beer — one of just 28 places in the United States and 96 worldwide. This year, that meant being part of the first two-beer release on Zwanze Day, as the Belgian brewer teamed up with a French vermouth brand to create Artemis La Blanche and Artemis La Rouge.
Attendees of the Zwanze Day celebration trade in their purchased drink tickets to grab their pours of the special Artemis La Blanche beer from Cantillon. The Wooden Nickel Pub received approval from the town government to shut down the parking lot behind its business to set up a beer garden. (Photo by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
Dean James, a long-time partner of the business and operations manager of the Wooden Nickel, helped organize Saturday’s celebration in Hillsborough. He said the day was six years in the making, since the pub had previously been chosen to host Zwanze Day in 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic wrecked those plans. After Burial Beer Co. in Asheville hosted in 2022 and Durham’s Beer Study hosted in 2024, the chance to take part came back around and the Wooden Nickel team saw its partnership with Cantillon peak.
“In accordance with doing Zwanze Day, we are also able to have access to some really exclusive Cantillon beers,” James told Chapelboro. “That’s what on tap right now at the pub and at different times of the day, we’re tapping six unique Cantillon beers. I think in our history we’ve probably tapped eight or ten Cantillons in total — so, to do eight in one day is pretty cool.”
Zwanze is the Belgian-Brussels phrase for the culture’s type of sarcasm or humor to specifically poke fun at someone. Zwanze Day’s creation came from a dispute between bottle traders and Cantillon, when Cantillon was upset that the traders were over-charging customers for their product that much more affordable in the brewery’s taproom. Cantillon used the day to create beers to exclusively be sold in bars, attracting customers to pubs to buy the sours instead of buying bottles with inflated prices. Today, James said, the popularity of the event is still driven by the exclusivity of the beers made for the de facto beer holiday and partnerships with a brewery of Cantillon’s status has helped put businesses on the map for hosting Zwanze Day celebrations.
Staff and volunteers for the Wooden Nickel Pub portion our pours of the second Zwanze Day exclusive beer, Artemis La Rouge. (Photo by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
Attendees for Zwanze Day at the Wooden Nickel Pub in Hillsborough raise their glasses and drink during a second worldwide toast, this time honoring the Artemis La Rouge beer from Cantillon. (Photo by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
To capitalize on its opportunity, the Churton Street pub got approval from the Town of Hillsborough in March to close part of the public King Street parking lot behind the business and create an outdoor, pop-up beer garden for Saturday. The Wooden Nickel offered food specials, including oyster half shells, while welcoming local breweries like Hillsborough’s Eno River Brewing, Cedar Grove cidery Botanist & Barrel and Durham’s Starpoint Brewing to serve their own beers. Staff screen printed t-shirts with different Zwanze Day or beer references on them to go along with the other beer-themed outfits worn by some attendees. And a lineup of local, live music added to the festival atmosphere for the entire afternoon into evening — with interruptions around 3 and 3:30 p.m. to take part in the worldwide Zwanze Day toast.
“We have been dorking out [internally] about how awesome it is that right now, 95 other bars and breweries around the world are doing this,” James said. “Everyone, no matter where you are in the world, is trying really hard to do it at the same time so that we’re doing it [when] Jean Van Roy, the owner of Cantillon, just did his toast in Belgium. How cool is that? In Japan, in New Zealand…and in Hillsborough, North Carolina.”
Plenty of the gathered crowd on Saturday were some of the Hillsborough and Orange County faithful who are no strangers to the Wooden Nickel. But some out-of-towners made the trip to join in for the special occasion. James said he heard from one couple who drove from Connecticut just to be there for Zwanze Day, while another attendee told Chapelboro they came from Denver and stopped by the Hillsborough celebration after looking up places with Zwanze Day events while traveling the east coast.
Just as James described “patience and time” as two key ingredients to Cantillon’s beers, the Wooden Nickel Pub and local beer community had utilize each to see Saturday’s party come to fruition. The Hillsborough entrepreneur said that in addition to Zwanze Day representing both the ability to experiment and honor tradition in brewing, it showcases the ways unity can be built around people sharing a beer.
“To have this crowd of people outside right now who have all come here to celebrate this thing together, it’s incredible,” James said. “In one word, I think Zwanze Day for us means ‘community.’ A chance to do this, to host this, to make our footprint a little bit bigger for one day — and a lot of credit to the Town of Hillsborough for supporting our kooky ideas — it’s been pretty awesome to make this happen.”
Featured image by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.
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