Why Locals Say Breakside is Portland's Best

Over the past couple years, I've welcomed a number of national and foreign beer dignitaries who've made the trek to far Portland. Rarely do they visit long enough to sample from the full range of good breweries we have in Portland (nevermind Oregon). So of course they want to see our best. But best is a funny thing. Two stops on just about every visitor's agenda are Cascade and Hair of the Dog. No one is going to argue that these aren't excellent breweries, but they make very particular kinds of beers--boozy, super intense, and not particularly sessionable. Special occasion beers. (I even met Brewery History editor Tim Holt at Cascade, and The Kernel's Toby Munn at Hair of the Dog.)

Photo by Ezra Johnson-Greenough, who has a great
report on the GABF at the New School.

When you live in a town and spend most of your time drinking in sessions, you appreciate different things. You appreciate those breweries that can deliver the goods no matter what the beer is-- do a top shelf kölsch, IPA, barrel-aged wild ale, kettle-soured German ale, saison, and a stout, and you have achieved something rare. A good metric for this is that moment when you're standing in front of a barroom taplist and see an unfamiliar beer from a familiar brewery. Do you order it immediately or wonder if it's actually in the brewery's wheelhouse?

If you asked a dozen beer geeks in Portland to name city's the best brewery, I'd be surprised if half didn't say Breakside, and if you gave them top five, probably 11 would include Dekum Street's finest. It rewards the repeated visits locals give it, when, over the course of a year as their mood passes through all these different styles, they sample broadly. That's when beers like kölsches pop--when you're really craving one. If you go to a city looking to be wowed by the best breweries and the most sublime beers, a kölsch is going to be a hard style to make the case.

I bring all of this up because over the weekend Breakside picked up three more medals at the GABF, and the distribution of their nine medals is pretty representative of why we admire them (asterisks equal 2016) :

• Rye beer*
• English pale* (two different years)
• "Australian-Style or International-Style Pale Ale" (Their session IPA)*
• German-style sour ale
• Dry stout
• American-style IPA
• English-style mild ale
• American-style strong pale ale

Breakside is that extremely rare brewery that continues to be on the leading edge of palate evolution but one that can brew absolutely any style very well (in Oregon, the only other brewery that achieves it is Block 15). If you are an out-of-towner planning a trip to Portland and you've seen all the hype this brewery gets, you may well leave with a more vivid memory of the visit to Cascade and wonder what all the Breakside fuss was about. It's not the kind of brewery that specializes in the show-stopping special-occasion beers tourists love; it makes beer locals learn to appreciate over the months and years they spend drinking Breakside's uniformly accomplished beers. Now you know.

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Oregon took home 21 medals this year, and congrats to everyone who scored some bling. Special kudos to Matt Van Wyk, who picked up a gold in brett beer category with his brand-new project, Alesong.

GABF Analysis: Five States Won Half the Medals

Last update, next day.  Two very interesting analyses came out today that are FAR more interesting than what you'll find here.  Both incorporate the numbers of beers entered per state, which make for a much richer and more accurate picture.  Stats geeks (and Oregon homers) will love them--they're sort of like the sabermetrics of beer.

• Geoff Kaiser uses stats to produce a "medal ratio."   Cool because it shows how many beer entries each state had (962 for CA versus just 214 in WA, for example).
• Brewers Association economist Bart Watson crunches the numbers differently and incorporates the different levels of difficulty in winning different categories.  That gives each state an "expected medal count" and actual medal count.

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Update, 11:55 am: Geoff Kaiser posted an incredibly interesting--and potentially revealing--comment about the number of breweries pouring at the GABF.  His figures are probably a lot closer to representing the number of entries per state.  It could explain a lot.

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As you are probably aware, the Great American Beer Festival concluded this weekend, keyed by the announcement of the annual awards and a storm of joyful tweets.  As usual, I tuned in to see how the locals did, delighted to see some impressive and unexpected results.  Tiny Arch Rock Brewery in Gold Beach took home a gold in the kellerbier category.  (You first read about that brewery and that beer--" the lager, predictably my favorite, is a rustic, slightly hazy beer more in the Czech tradition than German"--right here on Beervana.)  Barley Brown's once again demonstrated dominance in the hoppy categories (CDA, international pale ale, and gold in fresh-hop), and Portland's own Breakside took honors with a gold in the most coveted of awards, American-Style IPA (a fest-record 279 entries).

My own homerism got me thinking: how are medals distributed?  This was the first year in which a new registration system that vastly expanded access to the Fest.  In 2013, many breweries applied and were denied entry--and about 700 managed to get beer into the fest.  This year, the Brewers Association made room for up to 1400, and over 1300 submitted beers.  That's actually a huge number--right about half of all breweries in existence at the beginning of the year.  In all, an astounding 5,500 beers were reviewed.

I often whinge about the ever-growing number of categories, which ensure an ever-growing number of medals.  There were something like 273 medals possible, but judges didn't award medals in some categories, and in at least one category--Koyt beer--there were no entries.  (Is this proof that you can have too many categories?  I mean, koyt beer?)  Overall, 268 were awarded, which seems like a lot until you consider that only one medal was awarded for every 20 entries.  (Harvard's acceptance rate was higher.)  Of the 1309 breweries in the competition, just 234 managed to medal (17.9%).

And yet for all that, when you look at the medals awarded by state, you see anything but an even distribution.  We don't have numbers on how many breweries entered per state, so the figures only tell part of the story--but it's quite a story.  Just five states won half the medals, and just two states--Colorado and California--account for almost a third.  This is especially impressive for Colorado, which has less than half as many breweries (180ish) as California (381).  Here are the top ten, which constitute nearly two-thirds of all the medals won; the other 40 states managed to collect just 35%.

To add a bit more detail, here's a list, with the approximate number of total state breweries included (and keep in mind, I have no numbers for how many of the state's breweries actually entered the competition).

Medals Won
CA - 46 (approximately 318 breweries)
CO - 39 (180)
85 cumulative medals (32% of total)

OR - 22 (181)
TX - 16 (96)
PA - 12 (108)
135 cumulative medals (50% of total)

IL - 9 (83)
WA - 9 (200)
NM - 8 (31)
VA - 7 (61)
WI - 7 (90)
175 cumulative medals (65% of total)

Other states receiving at least five medals: MI (6), MN (6), MT (6), NC (6), MD (5), OH (5), UT (5).

I would be leery about over-interpreting these results.  Nevertheless, it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that a very few states seem to be way out in front in terms of making making medal-earning beers.

Wrapping Up GABF 2013

The 2013 edition of the GABF is now in the books, and the brewers are back home polishing medals or grudges.  Oregon took 25 medals, ten percent of the total, which seems like a nice haul indeed.  But before webfeet get a big head, keep in mind that California took 52 and Colorado 46.  And further keep in mind that the medals are only distributed to breweries who did (or were able) to enter the fest.  Of the 2,500 breweries in the US, only 600 got to enter beers.  When you look at the paltry haul for Wisconsin (5), Washington (4), and Maine (0) three superb brewing states, you can see how the numbers don't show the whole picture. 

On the other hand, medal-winners can take enormous pride.  GABF's blind-tasting is rigorous and no half-assed beers makes it through the juggernaut.  If a beer medaled, it's a very good beer.  So which very good Oregon beers were acknowledged by judges?  The 25 came from twelve breweries, and there were a number of multiple-award winners.  A few notes:

• The Barley Brown/Baker City Brewing operation is a medal machine: five in all, three of which were gold--including Pallet Jack IPA, entered in the most-competitive category in the competition (252 entries).  The brewery hasn't lost a beat since Shawn Kelso decamped for 10 Barrel.  Congrats to Marks Lanham and Eli Dickison.
• Nor has Bend Brewing, which lost Tonya Cornett to 10 Barrel, but still picked up three medals.  Congrats to Ian Larkin. 
• Harvester gets some serious cred for winning gold in the gluten-free category.  Everyone wants to brew a better gluten-free beer, and in 2013, they're all looking to Harvester.
• Bolt Minister (Old Town) and Dave Marliave (Flat Tail) were first-time winners.  Bolt took gold in the fresh hop category, and Dave took silver in kolsch and bronze in the catastrophically-named American-Belgo-Style Ale.  
• I don't know if the big breweries entered this year, but it was the little guys who brought home the medals.  In addition to the ones already mentioned, Breakside and The Commons double-medaled, and not-quite-so-wee 10 Barrel, Oakshire, and Pelican also medaled.  Of the big boys, only Deschutes (two silvers) and Ninkasi (1 gold) made the winner's circle.

I'd like to offer a special shout-out to The Commons for their silver in the saison category.  When I suggested it was one of Oregon's best beers, some folks scoffed--other Commons offerings are more complex, they said.  But that's just the point: Urban Farmhouse is an understated masterpiece, with tons of fermentation character highlighted by its small size.  The judges agreed.  Also to Ninkasi, which won, perhaps improbably, for Bohemian Pils.  Jamie Floyd and Co. have demonstrated remarkable fealty to honest lagers over the past few years--despite their reputation as a hop house--and I'm glad to see the judges agreed.  

Of course, congrats go to everyone--

The GABF and You

The Great American Beer Festival roars to life today for the 32nd time, and tons of giddy brewers are converging on Denver to see if their prize stouts and schwarzbiers might take home the gold.  I was reminded of this when I sent out a batch of inquiries about fresh hop beers yesterday--and got bounce-backs and hasty I'll-reply-laters written from airport terminals. 

Nebraska Brewing at the 2011 GABF.

It makes abundant sense why breweries get psyched for this fest: it's the brewers' Academy Awards.  There are lots of other competitions out there, but they're like the Golden Globes and Independent Spirit Awards--cool, but hardly defining.  As more and more exceptionally capable young brewers have set out on their own, the GABF has, if anything, gained importance.  When a brewery like The Commons, Silver Moon, Breakside, or Barley Brown's wins a medal--and they all did last year--it is a huge honor.  In blind tastings, no one knows you only make a thousand barrels.

For the 50,000 people who live in or travel to Denver, the GABF is also obviously a treat.  Denver turns into one giant venue, and on the drinking floor, festgoers have access to the greatest number of American breweries assembled in one place.  For beer geeks, seeing Matt Brynildson or Garrett Oliver cruise by is something like seeing Ryan Gosling on the red carpet.  I've only been to the fest once, but I can happily recommend that everyone try to make their own hajj, too.  It's worth it.

But what if you're one of the 300 million Americans who don't brew professionally and who aren't in Denver?  Every year I try to find a hook, but except for the Saturday announcement of the winners it's very difficult to think why this fest is relevant to anyone not attending.  It's a big party, people have lots of fun and make lots of connections, but this isn't anything we care about, right?  The selfies and celeb shots will start clogging Twitter as besotted fest-goers immerse themselves in the party, but those tweets contain a big dose of subtext: "don't you wish you were here, neener neener?" 

So tell me, wise hive mind: is there really anything of importance for the mass of men outside Denver?  Should the host Brewers Association think about ways to make it possible for more people to get involved--or is it better that the fest is brief and exclusive?  Is it good or bad that the GABF is one of those you-had-to-be-there experiences for attendees only?

(I am and have been for years on the fence about this.)

GABF Reconsiders Registration After 2013 Debacle

Perhaps you recall this incident three weeks past:

On Tuesday, the Brewers Association opened brewery registration for The Great American Beer Festival. Each year, the registration list fills up within days. Last year, it only took two days for 580 breweries to sign up. This year, however, it only took less than two hours for 600 breweries.

Complicating this year’s registration were server issues, something that has become quite common with limited events.

When you have a first-come system, you end up with things like multiple branches of the Californian Pizza Port chain getting in while stand-alones from around the country stood with their noses on the glass looking in.  No one thinks that's a great idea.  Now the Fest has a new plan.  From event director Nancy Johnson:

The 2014 GABF brewery will remain open for set number of days, and all interested breweries may enter the competition. The number of beer entries allowed per brewery will be based on doing the math of the number of breweries that registered during the sign-up period and the pre-determined capacity of beers that we can successfully judge that year. 
Here is an example to illustrate:

• Total number of beers that can be judged = 5,000
• The registration period lasts (is open) for two weeks; no clambering to enter during one short time window
• Total number of eligible breweries that apply = 1,000
• 5,000 beers / 1000 breweries = 5 entries per brewery
• Thus in this scenario, the competition would accept the first 5 entries from every brewery that entered
• Let’s say 2,500 breweries entered instead of 1,000: in that case, every brewery could enter 2 beers in the competition. The math would work like that for whatever number of breweries entered (Max. capacity of beers that can be judged – divided by – number of breweries entering the competition)

This is a pretty elegant solution.  It would further democratize the fest and likely spread medals around more evenly.  Firestone Walker and Chuckanut wouldn't walk out with their usual 37 medals each.  (That may cause other headaches for the GABF, like deciding breweries of the year, but one step at a time.)  It would also compel breweries to think very carefully about which beers they're sending, which I suspect would have unexpected and unpredicted consequences.  We'll see soon enough.

As a postscript, the GABF still has other registration woes:

Tickets to the 2013 Great American Beer Festival that were available to the general public were snatched up in a record-breaking 20 minutes Wednesday, causing many fans to vent frustration about scalpers suspected of crashing craft beer's biggest party and prompting more questions about whether the event needs a makeover. 

This is going to be a lot harder to fix, though the folks from Denver could look north for some solutions.  The GABF gets 49,000 attendees in three days, and there's no way to fold space to get more people in the convention center.  But they could, like the Oregon Brewers Fest, add more days.  That seemed to work out pretty well.

This Year's GABF Comes with an Asterisk

Note: post has been updated below.

Wow, what a debacle:

On Tuesday, the Brewers Association opened brewery registration for The Great American Beer Festival. Each year, the registration list fills up within days. Last year, it only took two days for 580 breweries to sign up. This year, however, it only took less than two hours for 600 breweries.

Complicating this year’s registration were server issues, something that has become quite common with limited events.

I don't know that I have a lot to add to this except the pretty-obvious observation that things are soon gonna have to give.  Each Spring the Brewers Association proudly announces the hundreds of new breweries that opened in the US, and each autumn they announce the "best beers" in the country--even though this year only about a quarter will even have had the chance to have their beer judged.

They may have to move from an "open" model of competition to an "invitational."  The crapshoot model accomplishes no one's benefit.


Update.  In comments, Vasili Gletsos, brewmaster at Laurelwood, offers a wonderful solution to all this:

Maybe move to a model similar to what they do for their National Homebrew competitons? Have a series of Regional Competitions that advance to nationals.

Yup, that's the answer.  Regional judging could be accompanied by small regional events as well, which would certainly be a boon all around.  Brewers Association?

GABF Photos

My pics from the GABF. If you want to read the captions to find out whom you're seeing, you might click through to my Flickr page.

What Distant Northwesterners May Be Interested To Know About the GABF, Final Thoughts

Safe and sound and back under the soothing, wet clouds of Portland, my Denver adventure completed. In the manner of Pete Brown, whom I had the pleasure to meet on Friday, here are some final scatter-shot observations about America's national beer festival.

1. The Beer. I went to the GABF this year with a single goal: sample as broadly from as many different breweries as possible. The structure of the Fest was tailor-made for my purposes; samples were poured in one-ounce increments, and breweries were organized by region. This allowed me to finally taste the beer Lew writes about in Pennsylvania as well as delving deeply into the South. If your goal was to really get to know the beer of a few breweries well, the Fest would frustrate; if you wanted to be introduced in passing to a wide number of breweries, it was ideal. I discovered:

• Cigar City (Tampa, FL). Yes, they're good in that "international extreme" vein.
  
• Fat Head's (Cleveland). Stanky, catty IPAs aren't just for the West Coast anymore.
• Destihl (Champaign, IL). Impressive experimentation with sours.
• Freetail (San Antonio).
• Uncle Billy's (Austin).
• St. Arnold's (Houston). I've long wanted to try their beer, and they didn't disappoint. Great lagers.
• Sly Fox (Phoenixville, PA). Brewer Brian O'Reilly puts out accomplished interpretations of Belgian and German styles.
• Yards (Philadelphia). Well-made colonially-inspired beers

2. Wits. IPAs were easily the most common beers at the Fest, but the place was lousy with wits, too. I don't know if this is because they sell well on their own, or because Blue Moon and Shock Top have created a huge market for them. But everyone brews one.


3. Sours. I remember when New Glarus introduced Wisconsin Red--perhaps the first tart ale in America (certainly among the first). Brewer Dan Carey considered its production a state secret and I don't know to this day how he makes it. But the larger secret's out, and now scores--probably hundreds--of breweries funk up their beers. Most use wild yeasts and bacteria, and an increasing number are cultivating spontaneous fermentations with feral buggies. I admire the trend, but someone needs to point out that sour runs a continuum from the pleasant, beguiling tart to the harsh, industrial acetone. After muscling my way through some of the really aggressive ones (nearly always made admirably, with brettanomyces or by spontaneous fermentation), it was a revelation to encounter beers like Ommegang's Aphrodite, a stunning beer that swaddles its gentle tartness in sensual, sweet folds of raspberry sweetness. Like hop bitterness, we must learn to measure sours on a scale other than pure intensity.


4. Chaos. There's much to admire about the GABF. It is the one national event where brewers from around the country come together to celebrate their product. You get to see all the stars and taste all the much-lauded beers. The downside is that the invitation of 450+ breweries means a site of wild chaos. The Colorado Convention center would fill up with 12,000+ attendees, all full throat. The sound of their voices ricocheting off the cement floors and cinder walls was deafening. It's not a particularly pleasant venue aesthetically, either. So aside from the beer itself, the experience is a bit challenging.


5. Information. The one big quibble I have with the way the Brewers Association runs the Fest is the information available on the beers. In both the huge physical program and the iPhone app, breweries were listed alphabetically, and their beers were listed by name only. The beers weren't even identified by style. Typical entry:

HERETIC BREWING COMPANY
Pittsburg, CA
Evil Twin
Tafelbully
Evil Cousin

Since you had to fight your way through crowds even to approach each brewery's beer, it was impossible to target breweries based on thee styles they brewed. Ideally, I'd love information about every beer there, including style, stats, and description. At a bare minimum, though, each beer should have been described by style, and the app should have been sortable by style.


6. Cuisine à la bière. The Brewers Association is making a serious push to put beer on the best tables in the land. During the Fest, they held an event called Farm to Table which paired selections from award-winning breweries and well-known chefs from around the country. (Our own Paul Kasten from Wildwood joined Oakshire's Matt Van Wyk.) They held a similar luncheon for the media. Finally, the American Cheese Society had a booth set up to illustrate how beer--not wine--is the Ginger Rogers to cheese's Fred Astaire. (Agreed.)


7. Gold Medal Winners. A handy map.

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The GABF is a force of nature at this point, and for four days it washes over the city of Denver in an unstoppable torrent. You either get on or you get run over. I would encourage everyone to go once to see the spectacle. For uber beer geeks, seeing the beerluminaries is a pleasure (meeting Pete Brown and Randy Mosher were among the highlights for me), and the heady experience of being surrounded by all that good beer is enough to make you lightheaded before your first sip. But it's also true that you need to rouse yourself to a state of energy, for the Fest is no place for the timid or weary.

What Distant Northwesterners May Be Interested To Know About the GABF, Don't Mess With Texas Edition

I'm a day late getting this up--when already the world is buzzing about the GABF winners. But we are a more refined group; we care about the journey, not the destination. To that point, I have a couple of Texas breweries that knocked my socks off. The first is a brewpub in San Antonio called Freetail that makes accomplished, experimental beers. There's no better example than Spirulina Wit, made with spirulina, a free-floating filamentous cyanobacteria (aka "algae") known mainly as a dietary supplement. The key prefix in that description is "cyan," because this is one funky looking beer.


It could have totally been a gimmick, but it's a fantastic wit (a muse for Jason Davis, the brewer, who makes several). It's tangy, light, and has the most subtle vegetative note--and my mind tried to tell me it was minty, too, but I knew it was just fooled by the color. An equally impressive beer was Broken Honeymoon, a delightful bitter made with Golden Promise malt and guajillo honey. Davis likes to use offbeat ingredients, but he works solidly within the idioms of standard style. Impressive stuff.

Next we go to Austin and Uncle Billy's, which has three locations. One seems to focus on lagers, one on NW-style ales. Since I live in a city lousy with NW-style ales, I gravitated toward the excellent lagers. But I couldn't help notice this:


(Hey Abe, it's working.)

What Distant Northwesterners May Be Interested To Know About the GABF, Part 1

It's always fascinating when your expectations meet your actual experience in a dark alley. Experience always wins. Coming into the GABF, I had on my Portland beer goggles, which as we well know completely blur our understanding of the rest of the country. Perhaps you wear the same goggles as I, and will benefit from experience-by-proxy.

1. Huge. I have always chafed with parochial slight at the GABF's claim to be the biggest beer fest in America--when in fact the Oregon Brewers Fest is. I'm prepared to change my opinion. The Colorado Convention Center is the size of four airplane hangars, and it's filled with hundreds of breweries offering thousands of beers. The place is so large that I got lost in the aisles looking for beers. The breweries are helpfully arranged by region, but it took me three hours to find the Northwest. The worst thing is you have to really parse your decisions, not only among which breweries to try, but which of their five beers to sample. One nice thing is that they pour beers in one-ounce increments, so you can sample broadly. There are no tickets, so if you want more than an ounce, you just get another pour. And finding people? Forget about it. I saw Angelo entering the fest, let him get out of eyeshot assuming I'd see him again, and never did. Here he is, in my last sighting of him:



2. They don't covet the beers you covet. There are some badass breweries at the fest, as you would expect. I was delighted to finally get to sample broadly from Jolly Pumpkin's line (flipside of the many-decisions downside is that if you want to really sample a particularly brewery's beer to get a sense of it, you can; with the OBF, you don't know if the beer you're tasting is representative). I scoped out New Holland and dropped by Boulevard for a pour of Brett Saison (and saw Steven Pauwels). Getting these beers was no problem. Some breweries had insanely long lines, but they weren't the ones I expected. New Glarus, which has a totally standard lineup, had a line of 100 people before they even started pouring beer. All their beer was gone by nine. (Great brewery, but it was still bizarre.) A Michigan brewery I'd never heard of called Short's was packed. The Venn diagram overlapped at Cigar City, which I also wanted to check out. Here's that crazy New Glarus line:


3. They give the NW a "meh." Because the fest organizes the breweries by region, I was able to see the relative activity by region. The South seemed to be getting the most attention, and the East Coast in general seemed to be popular. The Northwest was getting surprisingly little attention. Toward the end of my evening, I went over to taste some of the Washington beers I've missed--Chuckanut and Black Raven. In our region, these breweries are getting big attention, but that's just the thing: in our region. I've come to think of the Northwest as a little bubble, mostly sealed off from the rest of the country. This did nothing to disabuse me of the notion. (The Chuckanut, by the way, was seriously fantastic. Regular commenter Jack R is my brother in pilsner, and he would love theirs. The Helles, too, was sublime.)

I'll keep posting on what I see here, which I have no doubt will include more minor epiphanies. I leave you with the obligatory Charlie Papazian shot, which is sadly slightly out of focus (the light was horrible).

GABF Ho!

The 30th running of the beers will commence tomorrow at 5:30 in Denver as the Great American Beer Festival gets underway. It's an excellent opportunity to reflect on three decades of (pick one: microbrewing, craft brewing, good-beer brewing) in the United States. Charlie Papazian, the pied piper of good-beer brewing, convened the first GABF in 1982, before there really was a whole lot of good beer. Anchor, Boulder, and Sierra Nevada were in the house; Cartwright and New Albion had come and gone; Hale's and Redhook were just christening new breweries. To get a sense of just how different things still were, have a look at the inaugural program (pdf):

If you click on the photo, you'll be able to read Charlie's own hand-written note in the corner: 47 beers and 24 breweries. Most of the breweries weren't small start-ups and most sold fizzy yellow beer--though oddly, there was a lot of porter at that fest. (It's poignant to page through the list and see how many of the participants were about to end their decades-long run as stand-alone regional breweries and become neglected brands in the portfolios of national conglomerates.) This year, of course, there are scads of breweries, beers, and participants (466, 2400, ~50k).

At the time of the first GABF, small-scale brewing was an almost inconceivable venture. Banks wouldn't give brewers money, small brewing equipment didn't really exist, laws were designed to accommodate large-scale production and distribution, no one knew what ales were ... and on and on. Brewers in that first generation were in equal measures hippies who wanted to make an artisanal product by hand of natural ingredients, counter-cultural iconoclasts who decided to build breweries despite the hurdles, and born salesmen who had to invent the market for their product. Events like the GABF were among the few venues they had to get the word out about their beer.

Thirty years on, there's a whole new generation of brewers. What's fascinating is the altered landscape that informed their decision to become brewers. They didn't grow up in a world of cheap, bad beer. They didn't pass around bottles of Ballantine while telling stories of the strong beers of Europe. They grew up in a world of good beer. By the time they started drinking, they knew what IPAs were. So, instead of trying to invent an industry, they came in looking to push it further. Here in Portland, most of the new breweries are the ventures of young people (I won't try to broadcast that truth out and say it's the case everywhere, but I wouldn't be surprised). Their craft beer is not the craft beer of the older generation. To them, barrel-aging is not a radical innovation, but just the way things are done. They don't think of saisons as exotic. Amazingly, most don't even hate the macros--that battle ended a long time ago.

The GABF will be a perpetually evolving festival, reflecting the trends and mores of the brewers participating in it. It will have to stop growing at some point, but it won't stop changing. I'm psyched to finally see the great fest with my own eyes--and maybe when I'm Fred Eckhardt's age, I'll look back at this event and smile at how quaint it was back in the dark old days. Wouldn't that be nice?

Best New(ish) GABF Category: 14b, Fresh Hop Beers

As you may know, I'm not a huge fan of the ever-widening range of new beers styles judged at the GABF. Blackberry brambles spread more slowly. And yet one category--sub-category, really--is very cool. Lodged in category 14 (experimental beer) is a subcategory for fresh hop ales.

There are a couple reasons this style is a real boon to the fest: for one, while it's not exactly an American invention, commercially speaking, it's really Amero-centric. Here in the Northwest, probably half the breweries make a fresh hop beer--orders of magnitude more examples than anywhere else. Since there aren't so many truly American expressions in brewing, we should really ride this horse.

Second, the GABF is perfectly scheduled to take advantage of these beers*. [And see yet another update here**] Fresh hop ales have zero shelf life. That green, leafy quality that defines the style comes only from just-plucked hops, and it has the life cycle of a gnat. Whatever it is in fresh hops that give these aromas and flavors doesn't last. If the GABF were in July, you couldn't really do this category. But early October is the perfect time--in fact, you could actually really play up the harvest hop beers. The only criticism I have of the style category is that it isn't a stand-alone. Give it a few years.

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Deschutes Fresh Hop Mirror Pond
Speaking of fresh hop beers, I got a bottle from Deschutes of a beer I like to think of as the current owner of the Bill Night endowed chair of fresh hop beers. For Bill, no beers are as sublime as fresh hopped ones, and of this group, Fresh Hop Mirror Pond is king. (Given that each year is different and by necessity pretty much a one-shot deal, I understand this designation may be revoked.) In the case of this year's batch, Deschutes, working with Goschie Farms, went to OSU to find the original root stocks Cascade came from (they call them "heirloom" hops). It raises a separate, but perhaps digressive point: how has the strain changed? We'll leave that until another time.

In any case, the beer rocks. It has a vivid nose, alive with the green fresh hopheads demand. It's a vibrant, spritzy interpretation, not the least bit composty or strange. The quality of fresh hops is not for everyone; they're so green you get an almost weedy intensity out of them (this, I believe, would be considered among fresh hopheads a desirable quality). This beer has it in spades. No mistaking it as a standard pale. It's loaded with flavor. Although I am generally not a big fan of fresh hop beers, this one is in my wheelhouse. It tastes like a freshly-picked flower, still warm with the rays of the summer sun.


*Update: In comments, DJ Paul makes a really good point: "Beers that are to be judged have to arrive in Denver by the first week of September. Therefore the beers have to ship by late August and these Fresh Hop Beers are usually not ready by this time." It seems like there might be a possible fix to this; I'll ask around when I'm in Denver.

**Updated further. Tweet from Daniel Pollard at Pelican: "@Beervana the BA offered an exception to the beer due dates for Fresh Hop beers. Lots of us had harvest related delays to deal with."

Your Odds Vary at the GABF

This decision confronts every brewery when they start drawing up their list of beers to send to the GABF: which styles should we compete in? A gold medal's a gold medal's a gold medal, but the odds of winning it vary pretty dramatically. Consider these categories from the 2010 fest, their entries, and your odds of winning--assuming all the examples are super tasty:

Category 14, Gluten free beer, 13 entries, odds of winning: 7.7%
Category 47, American-Style India Pale Ale, 142 entries, odds of winning: .7%

This means a brewery is exactly eleven times more likely to win in the gluten-free category as in IPA. Put another way, you could fit eleven of the gluten free categories into one IPA. The flip side, of course, is that for the brewery to win IPA (or pale ale, 109 entries, .9% chance of winning), the bragging rights are impressive. For a year, your brewery gets to declare itself America's Best IPA--no small shakes in a country with two million different IPAs. (Interestingly, the claim to have the best gluten-free beer isn't terrible, either; that category is an important and growing one, and most of the gluten-free beers available aren't so hot.)

This year at least two of the beers from Mighty Mites (Oakshire's Little Smokey and Breakside's Grisette) are entered in the session beer category, which last year had 30 entrants (3.3% chance of gold). Not bad, not bad at all.

Evolving GABF

Note: Post has been updated.

In about a week, the 30th edition of the Great American Beer Festival kicks off in Denver--and the first that I'll be attending. We've come a long way in three decades. Those early GABFs were all about promoting American craft beer--or maybe more pointedly, the idea of American beer. In 1982 only a vanishingly small number of people even knew about the phenomenon, so it made sense to showcase American craft breweries.

Pretty early on, though, organizers wanted to turn the fest into the premier event for beer judging. They invited international judges and awarded gold medals to "world-class beer[s] that accurately exemplifies the specified style, displaying the proper balance of taste, aroma and appearance." The GABF was interested in more than promoting American beer--it wanted to encourage breweries to make beers as good as any brewed in the world.

So here's a question I have: if the GABF is judging world-class beers, where are the beers of the world? I understand the "A" in the acronym, and it makes sense that the principal goal of the GABF will be celebrating American beer. But I also wonder if it shouldn't be a bit more inclusive. How do these world-class American beers fare when actually judged in blind panels with world beers? Are we better at some styles than others relative to examples in Europe and beyond?

No rush. Thirty years isn't that long in the scope of things. American brewing is evolving, though, and I expect the GABF will have to, as well.


Update. I should have made mention of the World Beer Cup in this post--as some commenters have and as Barbara Fusco did in an email to me this afternoon:

The most recent World Beer Cup (in 2010) was, at the time, the world’s largest-ever commercial beer competition. (The 2010 and 2011 GABFs subsequently eclipsed that record.) In 2010, 642 breweries from 44 countries and 47 U.S. states vied for awards with 3,330 beers entered in 90 beer style categories at the World Beer Cup. The 2010 World Beer Cup presented awards to brewers from 19 countries ranging from Australia and Italy to Iceland and Japan, along with the United States. Awards were determined by an elite international panel of judges hailing from 26 different countries.

Charlie Papazian started the WBC in 1996 to essentially accomplish what I was talking about in this post--but in a slightly back-handed way. Among American beer competitions, the GABF is by some margin the most respected and celebrated. Adding a separate competition is fine (though the WBC is dominated by American breweries, which won all but 64 of the 270 medals awarded), but all eyes are on the GABF. I'd like to see international competition there eventually.

Oregon at the GABF

Note the update below, which clarifies the GABF selection process.

Every year the GABF comes and goes and I cast a momentarily longing eye toward Denver--then whinge with indignity that our breweries didn't sweep the medals. Well, for once, my eye won't be longing. I applied for and was miraculously granted a media credential. This means I'll be able to try to sample a vast array of American beers without having to travel a vast array of miles--handy for someone writing a book on beer. It also means I'll be blogging about the fest. To the extent possible, I'll give you a blogger's-eye-view of things, with maybe a dish or two along the way.

For today's post, we have news about the attendees. I was surprised to see the Oregon contingent ringing in at an impressive 27 breweries--or 5.7% of all breweries in attendence. They are:

• 10 Barrel Brewing Company
• Barley Brown’s Brew Pub
• Bend Brewing Co.
• Breakside Brewery
• BridgePort Brewing
• Cascade Lakes
• The Commons Brewery (Beetje)
• Deschutes Brewery
• Full Sail Brewing Company
• GoodLife Brewing Company (Bend)
• Hop Valley Brewing Co.
• Hopworks Urban Brewery
• Laurelwood
• MacTarnahan’s Brewing Company
• Ninkasi Brewing Company
• Oakshire Brewing Company
• Pelican Pub & Brewery
• Ram Restaurant & Brewery – Clackamas
• Ram Restaurant & Brewery – Salem
• Rogue Ales
• Seven Brides Brewing
• Silver Moon Brewing
• Standing Stone Brewing Company
• Steelhead Brewing Company
• Three Creeks Brewing Company
• Upright Brewing Company
• Widmer Brothers Brewing Co

That's nothing compared with California (84,* 18% of all breweries) or Colorado (74,* 16% of all breweries), but pretty good. Washington, incidentally, has 24 breweries in attendance. The full list can be seen here.


Update. Thanks to a comment below, I realize it may not be obvious by this post how the GABF selects breweries. Answer: it doesn't. It's not like Sundance, where even getting into the fest is a big deal. Pay your shekels and you're in. You don't even have to be a craft brewery. So the numbers I cited for participation are purely based on the interest of the breweries in the states themselves.
______________
*It's actually a little hard to calculate numbers because contract brewing and mergers screw things up. For example, Genessee, Pyramid, and Magic Hat are listed as "Oregon" breweries. Miller is listed as a Colorado brewery. I trimmed the Oregon list and did what I could with CA and CO, but I wouldn't consider these bulletproof counts.

The Whiff of Hypocrisy

The Brewers Association was founded to represent small breweries. That's their whole deal. You can make bad beer, but as long as your brewery is small (which it would be) and independent (according to a slightly odd, gerrymandered definition), you're good to go. Fair enough--it's their organization so they get to make the rules. But Jonathan Shikes wants to know why their showcase event, the GABF, then doles out buckets of medals for beer from their avowed enemies, the faceless multinational macros. For a Coloradan, the point is a bit sharper: of the 41 medals the state won, 8 went to Coors.

By jove, I think he has a point.

(I'll add: why do multinationals even get to enter their beers there in the first place?)

This Doesn't Sound Like Fun

See if you can identify the event:

Brewers travel from all over the country (and the world) to attend the festival and promote their craft. But as many, many brewers have expressed to me, both this weekend and at past festivals, they don’t really want to spend a lot of time on the festival floor because it tends to devolve into a semi-drunken shit show, especially at the weekend evening sessions. Seasoned festival veterans long for the brief moments in between the raucous screams that accompany the near-constant dropping of glasses (many of which are now done on purpose). Many brewers simply don’t bother to attend the sessions because they have no role to play and the scene isn’t about their talents and what they do for a living.

That's the GABF, though Oregonians are forgiven for mistaking it for the OBF. That's Andy Crouch, who has a quite a long and interesting post on the fest.

Relatedly, Doc Wort suggests the GABF travel to different cities every year, a proposal I heartily endorse. That would really undermine the frat-party quality, because you'd have a new crowd every year--one comprised mainly of first-timers. It would also do a lot to advance the stated goal of the Brewers Association--to educate Americans about craft beer. It would be logistically more difficult, but it seems like an industry of this size could manage to pull it off.

Update: Brewpublic offers the local perspective.

The GABF and the Meaning of Medaling

Ah, the Great American Brewers Festival, whose medals always glow shiniest on brewery trophy walls. Our love, our bane. Does any fest fill beer geeks with more ambivalence? On the one hand, it has the most credibility of any awards-granting fest in the US--ensuring that any beer receiving an award is a good one. On the other hand, its very credibility conceals selection biases: the only beers that win are those entered--and of the 1,600 American breweries, fewer than a third enter beers. As a consequence, we have a hard time relating to the meaning of a winning beer,

Add to that the innate capriciousness of judged events. Enter a beer one year and it may win gold and then strike out thereafter. To take one example, did the quality of Mirror Pond really increase this year; or were the judges just off their collective rockers in past years when it didn't win? Of course, the truth is that, in a competition with dozens of beers, the palates and moods of the judges will select almost randomly among a smaller--but still substantial--group of potential medal winners. Excluding the pro-am competition, 3,448 beers were entered for judging. Coming up with medal winners from that vast group isn't totally random, but let's just say that among the 3,211 non-winners are a few decent beers (and future gold medalists).

Another issue: as a parochial blogger, I dislike how Colorado always takes home truckloads of medals, while Oregon (and particularly Washington) get a relative snub. True, we know from past years that Colorado breweries enter in far greater numbers--and therefore have lower winning percentages--than Oregon, but gaudy numbers impress more than statistical contextualizing. So this year, Colorado takes home 41 medals, more than doubling up Oregon (19) and clubbing Washington like a baby seal (7). (And I wonder, darkly, why the Colorado-based host organization gives no information this year on which breweries entered, preventing me from scoring win percentages for 2010.)

And what to make of style explosions? This year's competition features 79 categories, for a total haul of 237 medals. The chances of winning owe a lot to, well, chance, but that doesn't mean I won't get a flood of press releases trumpeting wins this week. Over two hundred medals a year, every year, thousands in total. After a certain point, what does it say that a beer has won a medal? What does it say that a beer never has? Does seeing a medal-draped trophy cabinet tell a visitor anything about a brewery?

So here we are on Ambivalent Monday, happy to celebrate the winners, but also wondering: yes, but what exactly should we make of all this?

GABF Results: Oregon

Last night, a friend of mine who is now brewing for Trumer called and jubilantly announced that beer he brewed had struck gold at the Great American Beer Festival. Even if the beer you brew was designed eons ago in lands far, far away, it's still exciting to see your handiwork honored.

Oregon had good reason to feel pleased, taking home a grand total of 19 medals--though just three were gold. Special nod to multiple-winners Deschutes (gold, two silvers, bronze), Barley Brown's (gold, two silvers), Pelican (gold, two bronzes), Bend Brewing (silver, bronze), and Widmer and Rogue both picked up a pair of bronzes. Other interesting tidbits: Barley Brown won in the inaugural Black IPA category, staking a claim for Cascadians everywhere. Also, I was pleased to see a few lagers in the Oregon winner's column--pilsners and bocks. Who says the Beaver state only brews ales?

Anyway, here are the winners. Full list is here.


Gold
Mirror Pond, Deschutes - Classic English-Style Pale Ale (29 Entries)
Turmoil, Barley Brown's - American-Style India Black Ale (53 Entries)
Kiwanda Cream Ale, Pelican - Golden or Blonde Ale (55 Entries)

Silver
Shredders Wheat, Barley Brown’s - American-Style Wheat Beer (23 Entries)
Gluten Free, Deschutes - Gluten Free Beer (13 Entries)
Cherry Baltic, Bend Brewing - Aged Beer (30 Entries)
Wowzenbock, Deschutes - German-Style Wheat Ale (29 Entries)
Disorder Stout, Barley Brown's - American-Style Stout (27 Entries)

Bronze
Hefeweizen, Widmer Brothers - American-Style Wheat Beer With Yeast (43 Entries)
Hazelnut Brown Nectar, Rogue - Specialty Beer (23 Entries)
Deranger, Laurelwood - Imperial Red Ale (43 Entries)
Drop Top Amber, Widmer - Ordinary or Special Bitter (47 Entries)
Bachelor ESB, Deschutes - Extra Special Bitter or Strong Bitter (42 Entries)
Bridge Creek Pilsner, Silver Moon - Bohemian-Style Pilsener (42 Entries)
Shakespeare Stout, Rogue - American-Style Stout (27 Entries)
Maibock, Ram Restaurant and Brewery (Salem) - Bock (36 Entries)
McPelican Wee Heavy, Pelican - Scotch Ale (34 Entries)
Outback X, Bend Brewing - Old Ale or Strong Ale (38 Entries)
Tsunami Stout, Pelican - Foreign-Style Stout (33 Entries)

Final GABF Notes

A few odds and ends to wrap up this year's GABF.

1. Brewfather
In the early days of blogging, new bloggers could almost always identify their "blogfather"--the person who inspired them to start their own. (Mine is Josh Marshall.) Now that blogs exist as a medium, this is mostly passe. Not so with brewers. From Pelican comes this very charming note in a press release announcing their three medals:

Not only did the Pelican win three medals, but three former Pelican employees came away with gold medals as well. Ben Love from Hopworks Brewery in Portland, Ore., won two gold medals—one for Organic Ace of Spades Imperial IPA one for Organic Rise Up Red. Hutch Kugeman from Great Adirondack Brewing Company in Lake Placid, N.Y., won a silver medal for his Belgian Summer Ale and a bronze medal for his Whiteface Black Diamond Stout. Travis Zeilstra from Montana Brewing Co. in Billings, Mont., came away with a gold medal for Stillwater Rye.

Darron Welch, brewfather.

2. Win Percentages
In about 1996, I invented dry-hopping. True story. Two friends and I were putting together a brown ale and due to a little too much relaxing and enjoying homebrews, we forgot to put in the aroma hops. So we poked them down the neck of the carboy, resulting in the best beer of my early brewing career. That this technique had already been invented centuries earlier does not, in my own estimation, dim this great discovery. (We still say Columbus "discovered" the new world, right?)

History may be repeating itself. Last year, in the midst of expressing my pique over what I perceived to be yet another dissing of Oregon in medal counts at the GABF, it occurred to me that maybe I was calculating things improperly. Sure enough, when I looked at the amount of medals we'd won based on beer submissions (rather than total breweries), we actually cleaned up. This year I notice that this calculation is being made elsewhere. From the Oregon Brew Crew's John Heasley comes this statistic of win percentage based on submissions:

OR - 12%
CO - 9%
PA - 9%
WA - 8%
CA - 6%
MI - 6%
NY - 6%

From the Washington Beer Blog comes further detail (and some bad math):

Colorado = 45 wins out of 459 entries (10% winning)
California = 39 wins/594 entries (7% winning)
Oregon = 22 wins/172 entries (13% winning)
Washington = 13/162 entries (12.5% winning) [editor's note: 13 of 162 is actually 8%]

If you return MacTarnahan's to Oregon, our win percentage would increase, and it would increase further still if you gave us Pyramid. I don't consider Pyramid an Oregon brewery, but the beer is brewed here. Robbing us of Mac's is inexcusable.

Did I invent this metric? Definitely. Did I invent it first? Hmmm....

3. Chuckanut
By now you are probably aware that Chuckanut, the brand-new, mostly-lager Bellingham brewery, won four medals and Small Brewpub of the Year. You probably also know it was founded by Will Kemper, who in an earlier epoch founded all-lager Thomas Kemper brewing. And you probably also know that erstwhile Oregon Brewers Guild Director Jim Parker also works for Chuckanut. But did you know that the Seattle Beer Blog has an interview with Kemper?

Now you do.