Smoke, Sausage and a Secret German Recipe: Elberta Festival Draws Tens of Thousands Saturday

Area residents will trade summer’s oil-spill worries for a much simpler concern this weekend: getting a taste of the Elberta Volunteer Fire Department’s secret-recipe sausage before it sells out. The semi-annual Elberta Sausage Festival runs from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday at the town park in downtown Elberta, a block off U.S. 98.

Fire Chief Steve Kirkpatrick said visitors should simply follow the smoke. “When you come into town, you’ll see the smoke and that’s where we’ll be cooking,” he said. The directions are almost unnecessary — on festival day the smoke rising over the little south Baldwin County town is visible well before the park is, and the smell of the grills carries down the two-lane stretch of U.S. 98 that forms Elberta’s main street.

Because most of the festival’s crowd arrives during the morning and for lunch, Kirkpatrick said the event should not be affected by Alan Jackson’s evening “Concerts for the Coast” performance at The Wharf in Orange Beach, one of the last in a series of shows staged this year to help revive coastal tourism after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. “That’s later that evening so I don’t think it’s going to hurt us,” he said.

The two events, running on the same Saturday at opposite ends of the county, capture the strange season South Alabama has had. The oil spill had hung over the coast all summer, scaring off the beach traffic that businesses from Gulf Shores to Perdido Key depend on, and the concert series at The Wharf was part of a broader push to remind travelers that the beaches were open and the water clean. In Elberta, some twenty miles inland, the festival has always run on a different engine: locals, family reunions and sausage.

An Old German Recipe, Kept Under Lock and Key

Organizers expect between 40,000 and 45,000 visitors to work through roughly 7,000 pounds of grilled sausage, plus another three tons sold uncooked to take home. The take-home trade is a tradition of its own — freezers across south Baldwin County and beyond get stocked with festival sausage each cycle, and out-of-towners plan their trips around it.

Farm Fresh Meats of Robertsdale has prepared the festival’s sausage for nearly 30 years, using a recipe the fire department keeps closely guarded, according to owner Chuck Childress. The sausage, made from boneless pork shoulders and beef chuck, traces back to Alfred Stucki, who managed Elberta’s Locker Plant from 1953 until his death in 1973.

“We do make other types of German sausages but it’s not the Elberta recipe. That’s kept under lock and key. We only use that for this festival,” Childress said. “It’s an old German recipe.”

Festival day also reroutes the ordinary business of the town. The volunteer fire department spends the week before setting up cookers and staging wood, civic groups reserve their booth corners months ahead, and the park grounds are mowed and lined in preparation. For a day, the fire department is not just an emergency service but a host, and the event doubles as the town’s largest single point of contact between south Baldwin residents and the volunteers who would respond to their calls the other 364 days of the year.

The recipe’s history runs deep in a town whose identity was shaped by German immigrant farmers who settled the area in the early twentieth century. Elberta was founded as a farming colony, and the German heritage that came with those settlers left its mark on street names, church congregations and, most famously, the food. The old Locker Plant that Stucki managed was a fixture of that era, a place where farm families brought their pork and beef for processing long before supermarkets dotted the county, and the sausage recipe that survived from those years has become the town’s signature product.

Childress said the festival’s appeal goes beyond the food. “It’s a lot of fun. I’ve been going down there a long time. It’s good food. It’s not carnival food. It’s authentic German food. It’s just a big event. It’s good for the town,” he said, encouraging festival-goers to arrive early before the sausage runs out.

His advice about timing is earned wisdom. With crowds in the tens of thousands and a fixed supply of sausage, late arrivals in past festivals have sometimes found the grills scraped clean by mid-afternoon. The morning rush is the reliable bet, and regulars know to buy the uncooked links early as well, before the take-home supply thins out.

Funds Stay in Baldwin County

Proceeds from sausage sales benefit the Elberta Volunteer Fire Department, while other local nonprofits will staff food and drink booths to raise money for their own organizations, Kirkpatrick said. “So the money stays right here in Baldwin County,” he said.

For a volunteer department in one of the county’s smaller communities, the festival is the financial backbone of the year. Volunteer fire departments across rural Baldwin County depend heavily on fundraising and volunteer fees to maintain trucks, gear and training, and state and county appropriations rarely cover the full cost. A strong festival year can mean equipment purchased and certifications earned that would otherwise wait — while a weak one, as Kirkpatrick’s comments about past festivals suggest, is felt for seasons afterward.

The Foley High School Band and volunteers from other area fire departments will help serve the crowds. The arrangement turns the festival into a web of mutual support: departments lend each other hands, school groups earn money for trips and instruments, and the small towns of south Baldwin — Elberta, Lillian, Perdido, Summerdale — see each other’s organizations working side by side.

All 250 arts and crafts booths have been sold, and this year’s festival adds three bands and new children’s rides to the lineup. The booth space sells out well in advance most cycles, drawing vendors from across the region who follow the festival circuit through the fall, and the entertainment additions reflect the event’s growth from a small town fundraiser into one of the larger draws in south Alabama’s festival calendar.

Kirkpatrick said rain hurt turnout at last fall’s festival, but he’s optimistic heading into this weekend despite a still-struggling economy. “People like to get out and have a good time,” he said. “We’re all excited about it. We think we’re going to have a blessed festival. We’ve had some tough festivals and it looks like actually this one’s going to be a good one. I feel like we’re going to do great.”

Weather is the variable no organizer can hedge. A slow-moving fall front can cut a festival crowd in half, and the fall edition has had its share of soggy afternoons; a clear October Saturday, by contrast, can push attendance toward the top of the organizers’ projections. With a dry, mild weekend in the forecast, the department’s volunteers spent the final days before the event stacking wood, testing cookers and prepping the park grounds for the influx.

A Small Town That Grows for a Day

The scale of the event against the size of the town is part of its draw. Elberta’s population counts in the tens of thousands within its greater community but the town itself remains small enough that festival day transforms it entirely — fields become parking, side streets become vendor rows, and the town park becomes the center of gravity for a crowd that dwarfs the resident population. Traffic along U.S. 98 slows to festival pace for miles in both directions, and deputies and volunteer firefighters direct the flow through the afternoon.

The festival runs twice a year, in spring and fall, a rhythm that has held for decades and has made the sausage a recurring marker in local life — the meal families plan reunions around, the taste former residents drive back for, the item visitors from Mobile and Pensacola load into coolers for the drive home. Few small-town fundraisers anywhere on the Gulf Coast can claim a product with that kind of following, and fewer still can trace it to a recipe carried through most of a century.

Gates open at 8 a.m., and by Kirkpatrick’s reckoning the best plan for a first-timer is the simplest one: come early, follow the smoke, and don’t leave without sausage — cooked at the park, uncooked in a cooler, or both. The grills fire before the sun is fully up, and by the time the lunch crowd floods in, the line for the Elberta recipe is the longest in town.

Organizers point out that the festival’s endurance through recessions, hurricanes and oil spills says something about the audience it serves. The event has carried on through years when the coastal economy was struggling and years when it was booming, and its crowds have proved remarkably steady for an event that charges nothing at the gate and lives entirely on sausage sales and booth fees. That loyalty, longtime volunteers say, is what allows the department to plan rather than hope.