Award-winning beers

Most GABF award winners are almost always solid brews. The very best in a catagory? I'm sure most on here will agree that is very doubtful.

So if you want something to at least help filter out something terrible you don't want to buy, then sure its fine to at least guarantee an award winner is a well crafted beer.

As far as sales /marketing? No idea. I guess if they go around advertising in stores, but doubtful many sales are generated from a few beer nerds looking down the GABF winners list and making a shopping list from it.

 

awards sell beers, if they didn't you wouldn't have even asked this question. So they absolutely correlate. Couple that with increased brand recognition and it's a win, all the way around.


Taste is subjective. No, award winning doesn't mean you should seek it out or enjoy it, it's ok to not like shit too, no shame in that.

 

I am of the opinion that winning an award at a competition such as the GABF is indeed a worthwhile thing - those beers are worth trying. I will read the list of GABF winners and write down a few to seek out but I will not make Herculean efforts to do so.

There is always a debate when competition winners are announced whereby folks will say something like Beer Brand x of category Y is 'better' than the three beers that won medals. Well, did the brewery of Beer Brand x make the effort to submit that beer? Just because Beer Brand x is a favorite of yours does not mean that it would be the top 3 beers for the GABF beer judges who judge beer in a blind manner assuming the beer was submitted.

Cheers!

 

Top three winners of national or regional competitions have to be damned good beers to get thru the evaluation process judging, but there's no way to know if the gold medal winner is the best in the US or the region. Not all beers that could be entered are in the competition, and for the ones that re, I'll guess that the judges are rarely unanimous in their deccision. But these beers certainly would be worthy to pursue to give them a try. I'll try one out of curiosity if it is convenient for me to do so.

My local brewery took a gold medal in the GABF two years ago, and it is a very good Light Americal Lager, but it's a close call to compare it with other good ones that I've had and say it's better. The brewery has tried to keep it on tap full time since that gold medal, which is something they don't do with some of their other beers, and the gold medal is prominently mentioned on the beer menu boards, so thay are trying to capitalize on the honor. I'd guess that sales have increased as a result.

 

Knee Deep's Lupulin River is a GABF winner as per the medal painted into the can art. Totally deserving IMO, but the rub is that the beer just sits, bc Knee Deep no longer seems to be a "must have" brand around these parts. Now if the can had some cartoon hippies logrolling on it....

 

It’s a shame Knee Deep suffered the same fate here, it just sat and eventually it just went away. Some really good Cali ipas are long gone.

 

I don't seek out award winning beers, but I'd be lying if I said they sometimes didn't influence a purchasing decision - for example, if it's between 2 beers I've never heard of before I might lean towards one that won gold at GABF or something

 

If something around here wins one, I will definitely try it. Best ever? Rarely. Great expression of style and worth having--absolutely.

 

According to one history of the Stegmaier Brewing Co.:

But there were only 7 of them pictured on the label. (I used to wonder if there were only 4, tho', figuring the round ones might be the front and backs).


Tasted pretty good to me, but not sure I'd say it was "medal-winning good". They shutdown early on in my beer drinking days, and likely the recipe'd been tweaked at bit in the 60 years or so...

(Pretty interesting licorice-y porter, too - my first porter now that I think about it! No medals on the porter label - but there was a goddam horse on it. Why? Sure, that might not seem odd if you grew up in the anything-goes/nothin's-gotta-make-sense craft beer era, but it was back then.)

 

I think awards help to inform consumers that a brewery knows how to make top quality beer (at least a 3rd party of supposed beer experts think so). I don't seek out award-winners because there's so much fresh rotating stuff these days, but I'll certainly give them a try if/when I come across them. My favorite regular beers, Revision IPA & DIPA, both won a lot of awards last year.

The brewmaster who developed all of those Knee Deep award winners left a few years ago & founded Revision, and ya it's been seemingly downhill for KD since.

 

Nah, no quart cans in the '70s.
But Steg did offer bottles, both deposit and T/A's, in a variety of sizes .

 

If I see two new beers on the shelf and one is award winning I'll grab it first but knowing me I'll probably buy both.

 

I grab it a couple times a year when I come across it fresh. I still think Kern River deserves some of that medal for Deep River/Lupulin River.

 

Well, at least one brewery that won a blue ribbon seems to have done OK .

 

Yeah, a medal means something. Will it be your personal favorite of the style? Maybe, taste is a subjective truth. When I'm at GABF I like to try the award winning brews and compare. Usually I disagree with their placement, but I have never questioned how a particular beer made it to the top three of a category.