The Great American Beer Festival is here once again. It kicked off yesterday and the best coverage I have seen is on Twitter. Just do a search for “gabf” and you can see a few hundred tweets from brewers and people that attended yesterday. More festivities are going on today but tomorrow is the big day because that is when the awards are announced. Over 3,300 entries are being judged as we speak which is a GABF record. It looks like they added over 20 more judges, too.
The live video feed of the Awards Ceremony will be found at http://Justin.tv/brewingnetwork starting at 1pm Mountain time (3pm EST). I will be trying to tally the awards as they are announced here. They read them off so fast I can’t keep up (I remember some comments from folks thinking I was drunk last year!). I will also be in the Justin.tv chatroom during that time. I may not be able to finish posting up the awards because I have to leave at 5pm (EST) to pick up friends from the airport but plenty of blogs will have the full list up later in the afternoon/evening anyway. I will post some analysis later in the evening or on Sunday.
More on this year’s fest below.
What’s New This Year?
• More space! The festival hall expands to include 46% more space.
• 3,000 tickets more than last year were sold!
• Great American Beer School will allow attendees to have access to a series of beer educational areas including the
Brewers Studio Pavilion, Craft Beer & Food Pavilion, Farm To Table Pavilion, the expanded You Be The Judge Booth,
and more.
• Sustainability Initiatives: This year, we’ve partnered with Zero Hero to assure that all disposable items at GABF will
be either compostable or recyclable in the attempt to lessen its impact.
• 28th Festival
• Guinness World Record Holder for most beers tapped in one location.
• More than 2,100 beers will be in the hall (1,900 tapped). This will be the biggest selection of American beers ever
served on the planet.
• Approximately 18,000 gallons of beer.
• Expected attendance of approximately 49,000 (up from 46,000 in 2008)
• 457 U.S. breweries serving in the festival hall. (up from 435 last year)