Well gang, It’s GABF season again! We are only seven very short weeks away from the fest and I’ve got to tell you that I always get excited about it. Wahooo!! For the uninitiated GABF stands for the Great American Beer Festival. The GABF is the largest beer festival and brewery competition in the United States.  Over 400 breweries will be coming together to pour over 1800 beers on October 9, 10, and 11 in Denver Colorado…and you thought the Democratic National Convention was the biggest thing happening in Denver this year! This is MUCH better. In addition to being a festival, the GABF is also a competition. Breweries enter beers to be judged by a blind panel of professional judges and awards are given based on quality and trueness to style. Iron Hill Brewery has quite a history with this comp as we have won awards every year for the last 11 years and in 2006 we were chosen Large Brewpub of the Year, and (knock on wood) we’re in the fight again this year! Part of the whole ‘Dance’ is deciding which categories to enter and which beers to send. Every year there is a tasting panel at our Headquarters where all of the brewers get together and conduct blind panel tastings of beers from each of the Iron Hill locations. This year I think we have to decide on about 80 beers..and that is chore, let me tell you. I’ll have photos and details about the panel next week. 

North Wales will be entering about 6 beers this year including our first ever Pro-am beer. the GABF is encouraging professional brewers to team up with award winning amatures to brewer commercial scale versions of award winning homebrew recipes. Our Am this year is Dave Grosch. Dave is a little fanatical about brewing…which is one of the reasons we like him…and he is also a member of our local homebrew club Keystone Hops. Dave won best of show at War of the Worts which is the homebrew comp we host here every year. We were very happy to scale up and brew his Munich Dunkel recipe which we’ve aptly named ‘Dave’s Dunkles’ and it is being entered in the GABF Pro-am category this year. Last year’s winners were the guys at Bethlehem Brew Works, so we’d LOVE to keep the winning here in PA. Fingers crossed!

I am also on the GABF Judge Panel…and no, they don’t let me judge beers we’ve entered! I’ve judged for the last 3 years and this year I am finally getting a break. Unfortunately that means I won’t be going to the fest this year BUT we are going to throw a GABF party here at Iron Hill North Wales. I am working on getting a live video feed from the floor of the event for the Saturday awards ceremony, but at the very least we’ll be listening in on the audio and cheering for our beers. This should be a great time. Dave, Doug and I just filled bottles for competition yesterday. Check out the photos all over this post of us in action. I have set aside some extra beer from our competition run and we’ll be drinking it and counting down the minutes until the awards ceremony. I’ve got to tell you that’s going to be a nail biter. It always is. I’ll post more details soon, but keep your calendar clear for the afternoon of Saturday, October 11th and come join us.