Escape artist Dean Gunnarson has been performing around the world since he was a teenager. (alwaysescaping.com)

Dean Gunnarson risked drowning a lot more than his sorrows Saturday night.

The world-renowned escape artist was handcuffed and locked in a 240-litre metal drum filled with beer in front of fans at a Winnipeg bar, as part of a fundraising event for local food banks.

The drum spilled over with beer as Gunnarson was submerged in it by helpers. The lid was then chained shut with a combination lock, and a fist-sized hole in the lid was his only route out.

With an emcee working up the crowd and counting the seconds as they passed, the drum started shaking. After two minutes, a hand popped out of the hole in the lid and started frantically working the combination lock. Some 35 seconds later, Gunnarson undid the lock and pushed the lid open.

It was an unusual stunt for a man who doesn't drink.

"I don't drink beer. I don't do drugs or smoke. But I tell you, that (escape) gave me a better high than if I had drank the whole 240 litres of it," the 46-year-old said afterward.

Gunnarson has made a name for himself by staging unusual stunts — escaping from a phone-booth-sized locker filled with wet cement, dangling upside down in a straitjacket 200 metres above a reservoir at the Hoover Dam, and being thrown from a plane with a parachute while in handcuffs and chains.

The beer, he said, presented some unique challenges.

"My fingers are kind of cold from the beer … and I've got beer in my eyes. It was much harder than I thought."

Gunnarson's closest brush with real trouble was in 1983, when he failed to get out of a coffin in a Winnipeg river and had to be resuscitated by paramedics.

He said his parents still worry about him, but sometimes for different reasons.

"My Dad was worried that I was wasting all that good beer," he chuckled. "But my mother, like any mother, is always worried about whatever I do and just said, 'Call me when it's done.'"

The boozy atmosphere of Gunnarson's escape was aided by some of the actors from the Trailer Park Boys — the Halifax-based TV series about a group of perpetually intoxicated residents of a fictional mobile home park.