GABF Winners Include 23 From Oregon

 

Source

 

The Great American Beer Festival announced the awards for 2023, and Oregon had a typically excellent year. The state took home 22 medals, including big hauls for Beervana sponsors Breakside (four medals, including a second in IPA for their flagship) and pFriem (3). Other big winners: Deschutes (3), 10 Barrel (3), and Bend Brewing (2). Rounding out the list were Alesong, Falling Sky, Grains of Wrath, Grand Fir, Hopworks, Immersion, and Ninkasi adding wins. Our neighbors to the north had a slightly off year with 14 medals (it happens), but Cloudburst (2), Kulshan (2), gluten-free brewery Ghostfish (2) had great years.

If you look at that list from Oregon, you might assume that multi-medal winners were common—but they weren’t This year, the GABF handed out 303 medals to 263 breweries. It is very hard to win a single medal: just 3% of the 9,300 beers would win a medal. Winning more than one is quite an accomplishment, so congrats to those who did. Below the jump I’ll have a few other notes and numbers.

 
 
 
 

Those 303 medals went disproportionately to just a few states. Sixty percent of the awards went to breweries in these six states:

  • California: 72

  • Colorado: 36

  • Oregon: 23

  • Texas: 19

  • Ohio: 18

  • Washington 14

(It’s worth noting that the above figures don’t tell us anything about how many entries came from each state. New England breweries, for example, seem wholly disinterested in the GABF and don’t enter—so take these numbers for what they are.)

In terms of developing regional competencies, Texas has gotten a rep for a lager state—and boy did they deliver. Austin’s Lazarus Brewing pulled off a tremendous trick, winning both the Czech and German pilsner categories. Add golds in amber lager, American lager, and bock, and the Lone Star state’s lager cred remains very strong. (And those are just the golds.)

The hoppy ale categories continue to spiral out of control. There are currently twelve of them, including pale ales, and the GABF really erred in splitting West Coast IPA off from American IPA. That said, it’s instructive to see where the winners are coming from. Of the 36 medals in those categories, California won twenty. The only area non west-coast breweries seem to have is in the hazy categories, and even there, California picked up meals—just not all of them.

If you’d like to see the winners, the GABF has the winners here in a sortable database.

Jeff Alworth