Takeaways From This Year's Great American Beer Festival Winners

Over the weekend, the 2024 edition of the Great American Beer Festival took place in Denver, Colorado. For the craft brewers in attendance, it provided an opportunity to test their beers’ mettle against that of their peers — and for everyone attending, it was a great way to get a sense of the current state of the industry. Given that domestic wine and spirits are experiencing some turbulence right now, this year’s festival is a good occasion to see how their counterparts on the beer side of things.

All in all, 1,869 breweries took part in the competition, with the judges getting to try 8,836 different beers. What can this year’s list of winners tell us about the state of domestic craft brewing? Here are three big takeaways.

IPAs Are Still Ubiquitous.
The three most-entered categories of this year’s festival were all types of IPAs. 349 different beers competed to be the best Juicy/Hazy IPA, while 292 beers faced off in the West Coast IPA category. American-style IPA was third on the list; there, 217 different beers were in contention.

Interestingly enough, the winners in all three categories came from California-based breweries. Ambitious Ales‘ Professional Human Being won the Juicy/Hazy category, while Trademark Brewing‘s Codebreaker topped the West Coast category. Highland Park Brewing took home the gold medal or American-style IPAs with its appropriately-named Competition.

Highland Park Brewing Had a Great Night.
A win in the American-style IPA category wasn’t the only gold medal this Los Angeles-based brewery collected this year. In fact, it was one of four; they also won with their submissions to Contemporary American-Style Lager, American-Style Pale Ale and Juicy or Hazy Imperial India Pale Ale. (It’s also been recognized on InsideHook’s guide to Los Angeles breweries.)

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Teamwork Makes the (Beer) Dream Work.
An impressive 92 different collaborations between breweries — and another 52 pro-am collaborations — took part in this year’s festival competition. Impressively, the three medalists in the former category represented a wide range of styles. No Boat Brewing Company and Obelisk Beer Co. took home the gold for their Twenty-Fold Sword, a New Zealand-style IPA.

Taking home the silver was the team of Werk Force Brewing Co. and Rocky Reef Brewing Co. with their evocatively-named Stupid Sticky Fingers, categorized as a Wood & Barrel Aged Imperial Stout. And the bronze went to Live Oak Brewing Company and Hold Out Brewing‘s Spudweiser, an American Pilsner. It’s still an IPA-heavy market out there, but there’s notable work happening in an abunance of styles.