Kim, Trey, and I spent some time in and around Denver this past weekend. The big event of our trip was the 30th annual Great American Beer Festival. This was my 5th time attending the festival and 2nd time at the Saturday afternoon American Homebrewers Association members only session. Overall we had a fantastic time full of mostly delicious and hard to find beers. We met up with a friend of mine and his recent fiancé who had also spent time at the Thursday evening session. It’s now my goal to attend the Thursday session sometime in the future. This is the first session of the weekend, so all the beers are fully stocked and available. Occasionally on Saturday we found some of the beers we wanted to try were already gone.

Like Father, Like Son

In total there were 466 breweries in the festival hall, 2,375 different beers, and 49,000 attendees over four sessions. And even with all of those large numbers the festival still seems to be run so smoothly. I guess experience does pay off. Similar to last year the hot styles on display were sours, which I really enjoyed this year. It seems that as the popularity of these styles grow the quality of the beers produced increases as well. But the American-Style India Pale Ale category is still the most popular of all categories with 176 different entries. I wish I could say that I tried them all, but there is always next year.