Good morning from a Delta flight that’s bound for Denver, Colorado. I’m heading out to the Mile High City for the return of Great American Beer Festival, the nation’s preeminent celebration of independent breweries. This year, this big party marks its 40th anniversary, starting in a hotel function room back in 1982 and growing into a massive event spanning hundreds of thousands of square feet at the Colorado Convention Center. The festival has been on hiatus due to Covid for the past two years, but I’m intent on keeping my personal streak alive — I haven’t missed this event since 2008.
Since that time, it’s changed quite a bit. It’s doubled in size (though due to construction this year, it’ll be smaller than usual). Its competition has evolved from Fruit Beer being a hotly-contested category to IPAs and Pilsners being the most popular styles for breweries to enter. Its popularity has ebbed and flowed, from selling out in days, then minutes, and now weeks (some of this is a product of the size of the fest). But a one thing has remained the same: its name should probably be the Great Colorado and California Beer Festival.
Don’t get me wrong, GABF is still a hotbed of beer discovery for me. Since I don’t live in either of those states, their overrepresentation is an opportunity for me to find great breweries that I haven’t visited and great beers I haven’t tasted. But if you’re not an intrepid beer traveler or a “beer ticker,” that’s probably not important to you. At this year’s festival, 90 breweries from Colorado and 77 breweries from California have booths on the floor, out of roughly 400 breweries — 44% of the booths cover those states, despite Colorado and California together representing just 15% of all of the breweries in the U.S.
There’s a good reason for this bias on the festival floor: it’s expensive to send a crew of staff and equipment and beer to pour at a beer fest when it’s halfway across the country. Many Colorado breweries can easily drive to Denver and don’t even need to book a room for the weekend, while flights and hotels can really start to add up for breweries who probably don’t feel as though they get much out of participating in the festival when they’re serving their beer in a state where they don’t have distribution to a crowd that is largely local to the Denver metro area. That’s probably even more true this year, the festival’s first since pre-pandemic. With many breweries feeling the financial crunch after a lockdown that softened customer demand and a period of inflation that increased raw material costs, GABF just might not be high on their list of priority expenses.
New this year are a trio of “taprooms” that feature beer from breweries that can’t sink that cost but still want to put their beer on the GABF floor. And despite less participation on the festival floor itself, organizers say that over 10,000 beers will be entered into competition this year — a new record. So while pouring at the festival might not be as valuable a marketing tool for breweries, the prospect of winning a medal certainly is.
Good luck to the breweries who entered the competition. I’ll be at the award ceremony on Saturday morning live-tweeting the local winners.
Who’s representing New York at the Great American Beer Festival
This year, New York will be represented at the festival by six breweries from across the state, three of which are based in New York City. Alewife Brewing, Brooklyn Brewery, and Gun Hill Brewing Co. will represent the city. It’s a debut for Alewife, which opened their Queens brewery in 2021. Gun Hill and Brooklyn continue their long-running appearances, with Brooklyn flexing their muscle with a larger “end cap” booth, a feature they had when the fest was last held in 2019.
There’s a good variety of New York breweries otherwise, with Community Beer Works from Buffalo, Prison City Brewing from Auburn, and King’s Court Brewing Co. from Poughkeepsie representing the rest of the state. While there isn’t a Long Island brewery with a booth this year, Riverhead’s North Fork Brewing Co. has a beer pouring in the Collaboration Nation taproom during the Saturday session: It’s All I Can Dew, a Belgian Single that was made in this year’s Long Island Beer and Malt Enthusiasts Pro-Am competition.
This year’s six New York breweries are a far cry from 2019, when fourteen breweries from the Empire State poured, but it’s worth keeping in mind that this year’s GABF is noticeably downsized. Missing this year are state brewery guild booths that were a common feature in years past, where the New York State Brewers Association would offer beers from small breweries across the state that didn’t have their own staff at the fest.
While the Brewers Association doesn’t offer stats on how many breweries from each state have entered the competition aspect of GABF, at least six from New York City that aren’t pouring at the fest have submitted beer for judging, including Wild East and KCBC.
Brewery Tracker
Total brewery count: 2,812
Total breweries visited in 2022: 283
Total breweries visited in British Columbia: 48
Brewery Visit of the Week
Brewery #2643, Neighbourhood Brewing, Penticton, British Columbia (Visited 20-Apr-2022)
I somehow neglected to give this brewery its own write-up back when I visited in April, and I was reminded of my trip there when I packed my Neighbourhood Brewing t-shirt last night. On a vacation to interior British Columbia last spring, we happened upon this bright, welcoming spot in downtown Penticton that really impressed us with their beer. There was a boisterous crowd even on a Wednesday night, some sitting by a fireplace, some downing some tasty chips and salsa over beers like their Pursuit Pils and Gambler West Coast IPA.
On a return visit the next day (yes, we enjoyed it that much), I started to wonder how this place sprang up out of nowhere. Neighborhood was just over a year old when we visited, but it’s actually a sister brewery to Yellow Dog Brewing Co., an excellent spot I visited near Vancouver back in 2017. Once that connection was made, this all made sense — that West Coast IPA very distinctly reminded me of one I had on that visit to Yellow Dog. Every beer from top to bottom at Neighbourhood was well-executed, and the aesthetic of the taproom really meshed well with the theme of a friendly, local spot for people to gather over a beer. It was the highlight of a brewery-filled trip to this neck of the woods, and while I don’t know when I’ll be back in Penticton again, I know where I’ll start my visit when I return.
Number Crunching of the Week
It took some counting and cross-referencing, but I answered a question that absolutely nobody asked of me: how many of the 381 breweries pouring on the floor at GABF have I visited? Just a hair shy of half: 190. That still leaves plenty of room for discovery, even for me!
Social Post of the Week
A cool new offering from Brooklyn Brewery:
Long Read of the Week
Speaking of sustainable grains, here’s your chance to nerd out about them in beer. In Good Beer Hunting, Hollie Stephens details two perennial grains in the US that were developed to be more sustainable — Kernza and Blue Salish. They’re still in their infancy of usage in beer, but these two wheat-like plants could be a part of the future of beer.
One Last Thing
Great American Beer Festival isn’t the only beer festival I’ll be attending this month. Mash Beer Festival, a celebration of craft beer in Barcelona, Spain, is at the end of October, and I’ll be flying over for it. I won’t be the only one from New York going, though: Finback, Other Half, Equilibrium, and Barrier will all be in attendance, too. As I’ve said before, the beer world is flat.
Cheers,
Chris
Is the Neighborhood Brewing sign/name supposed to evoke Applebee's? Because... it does, right?