Are they rigged or are the categories just so narrow that pretty much everyone walks out with an award? I mean, how else could the likes of Natural Ice and Coors walk away with gold (!) medals?! Not that I don’t drink plenty of Miller Lite (silver medal, “American Light Lagers”) but under no circumstances would I ever consider it praise-worthy and I am not at all what anyone would ever describe as even remotely approaching a beer snob.
WTF, no Anchor Steam?
I have no opinion on if they are rigged or not, but certainly a lot of categories is a good marketing ploy on the organizers part. Why wouldn’t the organizers want the major brewers and their giant marketing budgets to take part? (Other than they are generally a poor excuse for beer of course.)
These awards don’t ring a bell for me, but scanning down the list of the breweries and checking out the category names for where the big breweries were winning… well, most microbreweries don’t even make American Light Lagers, American Standard Lagers, American Malt Liquors, etc. And for those that do, the microbreweries excel at the standards for those categories due to the sheer volume they put out and their ability to flawlessly reproduce a beer over and over. I’m a homebrewer and may scoff at many of those big brewery beers, but goddamn, they have reproducibility down to a science. I’m lucky if I can ever reproduce a particularly awesome beer ever again.
There’s a ton of categories and not every beer competes.
What this illustrates more than anything is that pervasive beer snobbery amongst the public at large is asinine. The shock isn’t that some of these beer won, it’s that so many people are so sure they stink. If the average consumer really did a legitimate blind taste test they’d be shocked by what they really chose.
I don’t buy the lots-of-categories argument. The big breweries won in the Red and Honey competitions; there should be plenty of competition for these. Either the big beers won legitimately or the best micros didn’t make a showing.
Is there a list of the breweries that participate in the competition? I see that they say ‘hundreds’, but I couldn’t find a list. I was surprised not to see some of the bigger micros with any awards. Did they even go?
Here are the breweries that entered (.pdf).
This is…not accurate. Well, it might be. Define “average consumer.” Most beer drinkers who actually care about these awards are looking for something other than typical American Macro brewed beer. The ‘Buds’ of the beer world.
American light lager isn’t a catagory that many ‘craft’ breweries have an interest in brewing, since it’s a style that has essentially been developed by the macros. Coors light & Miller light are competing against each other, not against Anchor Steam light…because there is no real Anchor Steam light.
I can assure you that there are many, many non-snob people who wouldn’t be fooled if you conducted a blind taste test between MGD (name your macro) and a Brooklyn Lager (name your micro). There’s more of difference bewteen beers than colas…and people still think they can tell the difference between Coke & Pepsi (and RC & whatever.)
Why do you hate craft beer drinkers, Omni? 
C’mon man have you never had a Natural Ice? Granted, it was competing against the likes of Icehouse and Keystone Ice, but I assure you those are all total shit. Why is that even a category? They have a category for Malt Liquor. That indicates to me that it’s “competition” just for the sake of giving out awards, like how everyone gets a trophy at the end of little league or girl’s soccer.
Natty Ice is the horse piss they used to serve at college parties when I was in school, in other words of the cheapest of the cheap beers. I drank plenty of it, and always regretted it while sitting on the toilet the next morning. How anyone can say that’s great beer is beyond me.
Hate to burst any bubbles, but tasted blind, you’d gladly swill almost any major macro-brew. I’ve run blind tastings with beer clubs. If you let them believe that they are tasting a home-brewed lager, tasters will give good to great scores to such things as Olde English 800 and Schlitz Malt Liquor.
Granted, they aren’t tasted against Anchor or Sierra Nevada. But against each other, with no outside referent…Omni is right on.
I would imagine that these awards are like others (Grammys, Oscars), where it’s just rich old coots kissing each others’ asses.
I didn’t take that as Omni’s point. I thought he was saying that the macros will win over the micros when tasted head-to-head.
And I get your point that an average person might rank MGD very high if you give them a blind taste test and let them think it is some rare micro, but that isn’t really the point of this thread. The NABA uses (presumably) trained judges – not average joes – and all of the entries in a category are tasted head-to-head. The best tasting beers should win.
I counted the number of winning breweries and it was roughly 93. That does seem like a lot of winners out of the supposed hundred(s) of entries. The breweries tend to be from the Northwest as well; not much from the Midwest and I didn’t notice anything from the East or Southeast. I can’t get the Entries link to work, so who knows, maybe all those other breweries are just losers.
I believe that particular event was the Mountain Brewer’s Beer Fest with the judging administered by the North American Brewers Association.
It’s the same for wine - and no, the professional tasters (those who do it all the time and who decidedly aren’t “average joes”) aren’t any better than Joe Average. Give anyone a cheap wine or macrobrew, say it’s an expensive wine or craft beer (or homebrew), they’ll praise it to the heavens. Really.
This doesn’t mean anything. People are gullible and it’s fun to makes others look foolish. Probably works with anything. Give a bunch of people standard-grade steaks and tell them it’s prime Kobe beef and they’ll tell you it’s great.
However, remove the deception and see what happens. People can tell the difference between Budweiser and Pilsner Urquell.
I’m not saying that macrobrewers aren’t capable of producing a good product; Budweiser American Ale and Coors’ Blue Moon line are excellent products that I enjoy and put at least on par with other like-styled beers. But Natural Ice or Olde English compared against anything on a higher rung of the beer ladder I feel quite comfortable I (or almost anyone) could recognize a large difference in quality.
Thanks DCnDC – that makes more sense. A regional festival with enough categories for everyone to take home a few prizes.
American light lagers, for instance, are hard to make. The flavors are very subtle and clean compared to other beer styles, and you don’t have much in the way of hops to fall back on. That being said, I also don’t like the style. So it doesn’t matter to my level of beer snobbishness that some giant brewery won that category and others - you’ll never feed me, say, a Natty Light and have me go, yum, what a delicious wheat beer.
The Great American Beer Festival, which is the premiere event in the country, is dominated annually by beers from the West. Colorado, Oregon, and California account for about half of the medal winners, maybe more. The craft beer movement started in the West and the region is far more advanced than the rest of the country.
I believe DCnDC is correct though. These results are for the Mountain Brewer’s Beer Festival.
The GABF results are here and the results are more varied with more emphasis on micros.
And, yet, when you ask beer drinkers to rate their favorite beers, 27 of the Top 100 brewers, as rated by Ratebeer.com, come from Great Lakes states (including the #1, and three of the top five), the same number as from western states. (There’s a possibility I may have miscounted, but the amount is roughly equal.)
Yes, the craft beer movement may have started there, but the rest of the country–especially the Great Lakes region–has picked up.