2015 GABF Winners

I suspect it will be moving a bit quicker now. My local place gets all they want (for now). First I had in the bottle was less than a week old! So easy to go down. They did a good job of keeping it the same on the new big system.

Cheers

 

Does Colorado just enter 10x more than everyone else because they're local?

 

Why should they have to? If the label/can has a GABF medal logo on it, they can already see that it won something. And the presence of that logo indicates that the brewery 1) is proud of the award and 2) believes that it has some potential value to a consumer.

I think you're overestimating the importance of BeerAdvocate to people who aren't already on here. Do beer drinkers who aren't already on BeerAdvocate really think that the ratings on here mean anything? Cite examples if you've got 'em. Honestly, I'd love to read them.

(It is also quite possible that I am underestimating the importance of BeerAdvocate ratings to beer buyers who are not already members here. My own bias, which I make no effort to hide, is that ratings on BeerAdvocate which are not backed up with actual reviews are worthless to me, personally. Your mileage may vary.)

If you have proof of this contention, especially in articles outside of BeerAdvocate, I would very much like to hear it. And if there are any beer store owners reading this thread right now who can tell me how a good BeerAdvocate rating helped them sell more beer (with specifics, including the store name and beer name), I would enjoy hearing it. If they can give unbiased examples of how a bad rating prevented a beer from being sold, that would help convince me too.

Now, does a GABF logo on the label/can sell more beer? I do not know. I'm trying to google that now, and it's proving harder to find concrete results than I was expecting.

 

A fine line with over buying, I think Bestway over bought unless there was a quota. Fresh stuff is here, and the older stuff is still waist high. The newer stuff is getting older.

 

When you google anything about beer - this site pulls up in the top 5 if not the top 2. For everything. It's far and away the most popular resource of beer on the web. It's in the top 2,000 most visited websites in the country per Alexa. That's a huge deal. "That other site" is in the top 7,000 for comparison. The Brewer's Association is barely in the top 30,000 and no individual sites are even in the ballpark after that.

When people look up information about beer, this site is unavoidable. If people don't put any faith in it (there's no easy way to prove that), they certainly seem to be using it.

If you're interested in pure sales, look no further than the few available top 250 beers that you can in theory buy off the shelf. In just a quick scan, very few of them have GABF/WBC medals, yet try buying one. Clearly word is getting around somehow. Ever see BA and RB shelf talkers? Lots of my stores use them. A couple use homemade medal talkers, too...so that's obviously of some value. While some beers have their medals on the label, that seems to be a bit of a minority. After all, it requires at least one label change.

 

I actually went and looked it up when I saw that. It's the ABV. Double red is 6.1-7.9%. Imperial red is 8.0-10.6%. Both of the other Double Red ale winners fit the ABV; but Bone Head doesn't at 9.4%. Wonder how that happened.

 

The brewery entered it in the category, mistake or on purpose. The judges didn't catch it was out of style, sometimes the alcohol is well hidden. It happens.

 

It's a lot easier logistically - so yup, we tend to enter a lot. We also have a new place opening every 15 minutes, so a little extra notoriety probably goes a long way for some of them.

 

Some good points but the "general public" and the regular patrons of this site and the various rating services are two completely different groups. The best selling "craft"--SA and SN --dwarfs the other stuff, isn't stuff people "people campout for" but represents the largest majority of craft sales.

Another good point re googling.

But scan the top 50 of the top 250 list--outside of Founder's Breakfast Stout and Roch 10, most are essentially unobtainable to most without connections or immediate proximity and are obscure to the general public. Expand into the next 200 and you start pulling in some other slightly more available things but really--very little is widely available and I would bet all added together wouldn't come close to the production of SNPA alone (50% of SN total production).

SOOOO--those lists great for the folks using the internet and in particular this site as but I would still say still represent the smallest number of those buying craft beer. Not saying the medals do better to generate buzz outside of the local area where I have witnessed/experienced first hand.

 

(Brewer's perspective here, so take it with a grain of salt, though I also spent years reviewing here and on RB)

Plenty of amazing beers don't win medals because of the sheer volume of beers entered and the personal tastes of the judges when it comes to the final table. You have to brew a darn good beer to win but not winning doesn't mean your beer wasn't equally as good. You also have to factor in packaging quality, since the beers sit for a month before judging. A lot of beers probably tasted amazing when they were mailed in but went to shit in that month because they weren't packaged well. IPAs that fall apart after a month in the can/bottle aren't usually the kind that do well.

As far as GABF versus BA rankings, I hate to say it but the tasting and judging ability at GABF is in a whole other league compared to reviewers on BA. GABF judges are some of the most experienced and educated professionals in the world and their collective ability to judge quality is much, much higher. There are some great reviewers on BA, but the vast majority have no formal training and are very influenced by hype/rarity/personal preference and any other real-world factor that you can think of. Blind tasting by trained professionals is much more meaningful in assessing the quality of a beer from a brewer's perspective, while BA reviews are better at assessing how well received a beer is by beer geeks in the market. Two different metrics, really.

Plenty of flawed beers sell quite well and get high ratings on consumer sights, but GABF/WBC/European Beer Star awards are the gold standard for validation that you are brewing beer of the highest quality, and brewers generally value that very highly and are proud of their wins. Sure, there are some small breweries that don't enter and sometimes mock the competitions, but they are a small minority.

 

Was that when Shaun said he was going to demand a refund of his craft beer association dues?

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X2zGPjDAb0_XBIa_KLBn6ALEQszbES5jzMiJbyhDhVw/edit?usp=sharing

Enjoy!

 

I can't argue the DIPA winner, Hop Juju is definitely one of my top 3 DIPA's.

 

Nicely put. Thank you for that. It's good to hear a professional's viewpoint regarding the GABF experience.

 

I'll admit that I was really impressed with Devil's Backbone Vienna Lager. Haven't had anything else that was good by them, however.

 

HA! Big shout out to the Tap Brewery in Bloomington, IN, even though the category represents a small market (honey beer)!

 

Bonehead is bottled.

 

I personally put a lot of stock in the medals. The reason I do is that they have a very impressive line of accredited beer judges and strict criteria. IMO it makes sense that the medals are just as valid if not moreso that ratings on RB or BA which are done by many people who are not certified beer judges.

 

Glad to see Juju win. It's the best DIPA I've ever had. It's replaced Hopslam as my early year once a year release that I look forward to.

And White Rajah coming in 3rd in IPA. Also won that blind taste test article awhile back. And you don't have to chase a truck to buy it, because it's right on the shelf. Maybe we should start a thread about making Ohio IPA's a new beer style.