GABF Medal Winners: The Beers You Want to Drink

This past weekend was the Great American Beer Festival, the largest festival of American-made beer in the world. More than just a place to drink great beer, the festival is also a huge beer competition.

GABF awards medals in 96 different categories. Beers are judged over five different three-hour judging sessions, done over three days. Beers are all judged by connoisseurs that have a specific area of expertise, and they’re never allowed to be judges for any part of the competition they entered, not where there’s any other beer they have a vested interested in.

Here’s how the awards are broken down:

Gold – A world-class beer that accurately exemplifies the specified style, displaying the proper balance of taste, aroma and appearance.

Silver– An excellent beer that may vary slightly from style parameters while maintaining close adherence to the style and displaying excellent taste, aroma and appearance.

Bronze – A fine example of the style that may vary slightly from style parameters and/or have minor deviations in taste, aroma or appearance

GABF awarded 293 medals in total this year. That’s a ton for us to publish, so we just picked out 10 outstanding categories.

Benchtop Brewing Co. won gold for Mermaid’s Scorn for the Leipzig-Style Gose or Contemporary Gose category.

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