Award-winning beers

I seek out beer that is great representation of style, and be it a glowing review I read, or a medal award I see, I am definitely gonna want to try it.

 

What's in a name? Apparently it can mean an awful lot.

 

For me it will be mentally handing out personal awards (), because I have a possibility to try them all in the NA category, will get only a few hundred different. Not to say I'm not interested in awards, will maybe have an (inter)national winner another time just for tasting if I missed something. Maybe hunt it too if not having had it yet.

 

As most others have said, awards in beer usually mean something, but they aren't everything. If a beer wins a medal, it's almost always worth trying, but I've usually found that even gold winners of GABF aren't my favorite examples of a given style.

Medals definitely aid in marketing, though, and they play into hype as well. This is especially obnoxious with already limited beers (doubly so with whisky: see Henry McKenna 10 BiB's recent insanity).

Overall, medals are a fairly reliable indication of quality but not of perfection.

 

Well, one difference about a competition like GABF is that the beers are tasted blind. If my memory is correct you have conducted a number of blind taste tests of certain beer styles. In your blind taste tests did your favorite beer prior to the test always win Gold?

Cheers!

 

Good point, and I'll clarify since you brought it up. No, my prior favorite definitely did not always win, and whatever wins in my tastings always goes on to be my go-to for whatever style it might be, taking the place of my former favorite.

The thing about medals at competitions is simply that I wasn't there, and therefore the winners are the winners based on those people's palates of those beers on that particular day (which I always note in my tastings as well). If I had been there, maybe there would've been a different winner, and most certainly I would have pulled for a different beer than the one that won in certain categories. The reason I don't think, say, GABF Golds are necessarily the best in their class despite the blind tasting element is that they often aren't the best to me. That doesn't mean that they're not in the tops of their respective classes, though, just that perhaps I wouldn't have voted for the eventual winners myself. Does that make sense?

 

I fully understand you here since I too have this same thought. But since my preferred beer of a given style is not consumed by me blind I am not free of bias. Maybe my favorite IPA is my favorite since it is from Hill Farmstead? Would this beer still be my favorite if I tasted it blind in the same round as Bells Two Hearted, FW Union Jack,...?

Cheers!

 

I have zero doubt that you would pick out a HF IPA from Two Hearted, etc. blind. I would bet money on it and give odds.

 

Won't know 'til we try!

 

It's like getting a JD Power award in the auto industry (a bunch of bs). I like seeing who won locally too, but to be honest the only judge I give a shit about is me.

 

I'm not especially aware of beer awards - but I have seen some results from time to time that left me in disbelief.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - but I am especially wary of anyone who believes their opinion is expert.

 

In the end that's the rub. The medal was awarded (GABF BLIND TASTING being our example at this point) at a festival where the categories are subjectively divided, the beers are subjectively judged, and not every beer that fits the style gets entered. I would like to see how some of the heavy hitting ne breweries stack up in the neipa category against the breweries who already enter that category. But they won't, so we are all left with a big "what if?".

 

Life is a mystery?

Cheers!

 

One additional complexity: The way most of these competitions are run it is possible for there to be a Silver and Bronze medal awarded but no Gold Medal.

As for percentage of entrants vs possible entrants you can estimate those yourself. For example GABF tells us how many entrants there were in each category. The BA database lets us figure how many of each style are in the database. (e.g., for Vienna Lagers there are 1226 entries.)

 

The figures are usually available for how many beers of a particular style are entered in a competition, and using GABF and the IPA style as an example, if my memory is clear, I think there were 400-500 beers entered into that style category. If there are 7,000 breweries in the US, and many breweries have multiple IPAs in their line-up, conceiveably there could be 20,000 IPAs brewed in the US in any given year.

Less popular beer styles, let's use Grisette, might have only 30-40 entered at GABF, but there may be only 70 breweries out of those 7,000 that brew one of these. So the percentage of penetration in any particular style will vary and no one ever knows any kind of an exact answer.

 

Do those BA number reflect retired beers as well?

 

Unknown.