Bikes And Beer: Women’s Mountain Biking Club Teams Up With Holy Whale Brewery
MONCTON – Les Dusty Ladies, a women’s mountain biking club out of Moncton, is teaming up with Holy Whale Brewery to launch a beer called The Dusty Rider in September.
The beer will be a fruity, tropical hazy pale ale, “something that may conjure up the idea of dust,” said brewery co-owner Jeff Grandy. It will be available at both the Alma location and the Riverview beer garden.
A percentage of the beer sales will go back to the group to help fund activities that help lower the barriers of entry to mountain biking.
Holy Whale will also be the sponsor on the jersey of Les Dusty Ladies, an independent group of women riders that aim to get more women into the sport. There are currently 122 members in the Facebook group, but around 30 people ride together regularly, though not all at once, said founders Dominique Gaudet and Mylène Després.
The couple, who have been riding for more than two years, says the group chose to be sponsored by a brewery because beer is popular among mountain bikers. It also reflects the group’s spirit – it’s about fun, not competition, they said.
“You can compete with yourself as hard or as little as you want. But at the end of the day, you’re not competing with anybody else. And we’re going to wait for you and we’re all going to encourage you to go down that hill and or up that hill,” said Gaudet.
The group started in May to help new or potential riders who feel intimidated ease into the sport. There are no leaders, so anybody who wants to initiate a ride can do so.
While Les Dusty Ladies is a women’s group, men can join too. Those interested can request for approval on the Facebook group and follow them on Instagram to see what they’re up to.
As an entrepreneur – she runs the co-working space La Station – Després says the sport helps her with life’s stresses. Gaudet agrees, saying riding up or down hills rapidly also makes her feel invincible.
“It’s such a great sport…from whole body workout to cardio to meditation because if you start thinking about something else, you’re falling down that hill. And so it’s like the whole package,” Després said. “It’s really it’s one of the things you could do during Covid. It’s outside, and you don’t touch people.”
They’ve also seen benefits through the connections they’ve made, including with similar women’s mountain biking groups in Fredericton, Saint John, Edmundston, and other parts of Atlantic Canada.
“It’s a sport where you see your progress every single ride that you’re on. And so it’s really rewarding, and then having a beer over it afterward in the parking lot or wherever we are in whichever park we’re in. There’s a real sense of community in the sport,” she said.
Grandy said the partnership with Les Dusty Ladies is a good fit, given both of Holy Whale’s locations are surrounded by trails and biking destinations.
“We’re next to one of the top biking destinations for the Maritimes – the Fundy National Park, and also independent trails surrounding our brewery, so we’re very well aware of this even prior to starting our business in that outdoors folks, and bikers specifically, there appears to be a good relationship for years between independent craft beer and the biking community,” Grandy said.
Holy Whale had also sponsored the summit of Mountain Bike Atlantic, an ACOA-funded non-profit project overseen by the charity Friends of Fundy that was launched to promote the region as a mountain biking destination. Both Gaudet and Despres are advocates for the project.
They say many mountain bikers travel within the Atlantic Bubble to bike, and they recently did the same.
“I got messages from people in Nova Scotia that said they want to come in, and people from PEI,” Despres said. “Also we took advantage of the connections that we made through mountain bike Atlantic to go biking in the valley, go biking in Halifax. And we’re going to ride together in September in Campbellton.”
This is the first in a two-part series. In part two, we explore mountain biking tourism in New Brunswick and beyond.