Great American Beer Festival

We just got back from an incredible few days in Denver, CO where the Brewer's Association was holding their 30th annual Great American Beer Festival.

For those who have never been, GABF is truly a remarkable time and we highly recommend you get there at some point in the future.  Held annually in the convention center in downtown Denver, the hall is filled with thousands of people trying beers from hundreds and hundreds of breweries from all around the United States.  It's an incredible time for us to showcase our beer to people from all over the country who don't typically get to see our beers and even if they do, they never get to see any of the more rare beers...like Oude Tart and Black Tuesday.  

Nothing gives us a better feeling than having a line of people at our booth, super excited to try some of our beers and letting us know how much they enjoy them.  This year we had people at our booth for another reason as well, however.  People came by to take photos because we decided to decorate our booth with loads of images of cats as well as stuffed animal cats and cat toys.  There was no true reasoning behind our cat theme, we just thought it was hilarious.

GABF is not only a festival for tasting interesting beers, but it is the largest commercial beer competition in the world, this year having close to 600 breweries enter a total of 3,930 beers to the various categories.  And of all of those entries, we are very very proud to say we took home two silver medals and one gold medal!  Both Hottenroth and The Wanderer won silver and Papier, our very first anniversary beer and one of the very first batches of beer brewed at The Bruery took a gold medal. 

The fact that two of our sour ales and one of our biggest and most complex bourbon barrel aged strong ales took home awards just gives us that much more faith in our Quercus Maximus project.  As we continue to brew more of these intricate beers, hopefully we can win some more awards in the future!

GOLD MEDALS!!!

If you haven't yet heard, this past week was the Craft Brewers Conference in Chicago. Patrick, Rachel, Tyler, Jonas and Doug all went out there to attend some seminars, lead some seminars and drink a lot of beer. The week was pretty great and its cool going to events like that now that we have a bit of an established name in the industry. Kind of crazy how two years ago we were barely a professional brewery and this year Patrick was on a panel with some of the nations top brewery owners like Vinnie from Russian River and Sam from Dogfish Head.

The real fun of the weekend came on the last night. The CBC concludes with a banquet dinner and the World Beer Cup awards. Typically, we enjoy these events because there is good food and beer, but this year we had a bit more to be happy about. WE WON TWO GOLD MEDALS!!!

Our 100% Brett Autumn Maple, a version of our Fall seasonal fermented exclusively on brettanomyces yeast, won the Gold in the Experimental Beer category. This was pretty darned awesome.

But then, a few categories later, we heard our name called again! Oude Tart, our Flemish Red, won the Gold in the Flanders Style Ale category!

We seriously couldn't believe it. Not only did we win two medals, but it was two GOLD medals! That means two of our beers are the best in the world at the style they are aiming for. A bigger compliment can not be handed to a brewer.

Pretty awesome.

Thanks to everyone who's been sticking by our side since the beginning and thanks as well to those who may have just discovered our little brewery. We're two year and two medals in and have no intentions on stopping.