Your 2026 GABF Winners
If you are a right proper beer sicko, you already know the GABF announced their 2025 slate of winners yesterday, and you have memorized who won the bronze in European-Style Amber Ale.* For those of you who may have instead been watching the Green Bay Packers’ Jordan Love tear apart an overconfident Bears secondary, I have some news.
The Great American Beer Fest is both the most important beer competition in the U.S., and also the most absurd. It now includes cider, hop water, and non-alcoholic beer as well as ever-splintering categories like IPAs (8 medal-awarding substyles) and pilsner (5), 112 in all. That puts 336 medals up for grabs, which seems like a lot until you consider that 7,267 entries were submitted—a win rate of just 4.6%. It is a big, crazy event, and still the competition everyone wants to win.
We’ll get to some of the results soon, but how about a few more figures? About 1,300 breweries entered, which is a lot, but just one in six or seven, depending on how we count breweries. It takes a lot of judges to get through those beers (225), and around the same amount of volunteers. The most-entered categories were WC IPA, hazy IPA, märzen, American IPA, and (tie) German pilsner and German festbier. Wait, what? Märzen and festbier?? We’re going to have to look into that. (All the results are here.)
Big Winners (National)
One of the most frustrating things about the GABF is that we never know who entered, nor how many breweries entered from a given state. So when you glance at the results and see that the West Coast took in 132 medals, while New England took in a mere 15, you might make certain assumptions. But without knowing the denominator—how many entries New England and the West Coast states sent—there’s no way to evaluate these results. If New England only sent 20 beers, well, that would change things, wouldn’t it? With that long preamble, here are your major winners by state. I would like to note that while Colorado finished with more overall medals, it actually received one fewer medals for beer than Oregon, which may be the first time it ever slipped to third. California, with somewhere north of 800 breweries—again, counting is hard—dominated as they usually do.
• CA: 81 (including 5 ciders)
• CO: 39 (8 ciders)
• OR: 34 (2 cider)
• WA: 17
• NC: 15
• TX: 15
• VA: 13
• IL: 11
• OH: 9
• AZ: 8
• UT: 7
There are a few bragging-rights categories, and it’s always fun to see who won those:
American IPA: 🥇Breakside IPA (OR), 🥈Grains of Wrath Built for Speed (WA), 🥉Pinthouse Green Battles (TX)
Hazy IPA: 🥇 Bend Brewing Because Science (OR), 🥈McMenamins Icy Fog (OR), 🥉 New York Beer Project The Goat (NY)
West Coast IPA: 🥇Human People Before and After Science (WA), 🥈TapRoom Beer Born Hoppy (CA),🥉 pFriem Mosaic + Krush Cryo (OR)
German Pilsner: 🥇Altstadt Pils (TX), 🥈Templin Family Fass Bier (UT), 🥉Beachwood Pazifik Coast Highway (CA)
And I guess we have to include Märzen: 🥇Altstadt Oktoberfest (TX), 🥈 Bingo Oktoberfest (VA), 🥉 MainStage Oktoberfest (CO).
Big Winners (Oregon)
Oregon had another banner year, winning 32 medals for beer, of which 17 were gold. That’s quite impressive: they won 16% of the gold medals awarded in the competition. Two companies won brewery of the year, for the second-smallest size (UPP Liquids, 250–500 barrels) and second largest (Breakside, (15,000–100,000 barrels). This is the second year in a row UPP has won that laurel, which means they have been the best brewery of the year their entire existence. That’s a lot of pressure for ‘27! Although it’s hard for me to believe, I think that’s the first best-brewery win for Breakside, which had won 31 medals at the competition before this year’s five.
While we’re talking Breakside, their IPA took gold in American IPA, which is the fifth time that beer has medaled at the GABF, surely making it one of the most-celebrated IPAs in the US. Burnishing their hoppy cred, Breakside won four medals in hoppy categories, including the gold for WC Pils. UPP won four medals, and three of them were gold. One of those golds is for UPP Yours, which is a cucumber sour of a kind brewer Tonya Cornett pioneered at the brewery that fired her, 10 Barrel. In light of this, the meaning of “UPP Yours” is perhaps less mysterious.
We need to give a special call-out to Bend Brewing, which won the 🥇 for Because Science in the hazy IPA category, following up its gold in the same category earlier this year at the World Beer Cup AND the Oregon Beer Awards. In 2022, Von Ebert won golds at the GABF and OBAs for Volatile Substance and I declared we’d never see that again. Another prediction failed after just four years.
Other multiple-medal winners include: Alesong (3), Sunriver (3), Bend Brewing (2), pFriem (2), Worthy (2). In the great Bend vs Portland battle, David once again defeated Goliath, 11-10.
As always, congratulations to all the winners!
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* Stein Altbier, from some little outfit in California called Sierra Nevada