2024 FoBAB Results | Festival of Wood & Barrel-Aged Beers Award Winners

One of our favorite time for beer throughout the year has returned. Barrel-aged beer season is finally back! The onset of November always signals the perfect time to cozy up to some barrel-aged Stouts, Porters, Wilds, and Sours. And what better way to commemorate the season than with the return of the Festival of Barrel-Aged Beer (FoBAB), one of the best showcases of barrel-aged beers in the country.

The results are IN and we now know all of the big award winners from this year’s 2024 Festival of Wood and Barrel-Aged Beers (FoBAB). This year’s 22nd annual FoBAB was once again a spectacular success showcasing the country’s absolute best producers in the wood and barrel-aged beer categories.

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Recapping the Highlights from 2024 Denver Rare Beer Tasting

The 15th running of Denver’s Rare Beer Festival saw one major change–the venue. Previously hosted at the McNichols Civic Center Building and before that, Wynkoop Brewing, election year-related scheduling conflicts at McNichols meant that Rare Beers needed a new home. Given that many visitors and brewers in town for GABF already make a yearly pilgrimage to Bierstadt Lagerhaus between convention shifts, the new venue was a natural fit.

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2024 GABF Awards Results | Full Breakdown of GABF Winners

The 2024 Great American Beer Festival stormed back in a big way from an attendee standpoint, as we noted earlier in our day one recap, in large part due to its experiential tweaks for festival-goers and the competition yielded impressive results as well.

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Colorado Breweries Who Won Big at the 2024 GABF Competition

Colorado breweries boasted another impressive showing at the 2024 Great American Beer Festival. This year, Colorado breweries took home 38 medals with 34 different brewery locations celebrating awards, nearly matching the impressive outing of 40 medals coming from the Centennial State. An additional three medals were awarded to a pair of Colorado cideries, in Haykin Family Cider (Aurora, CO) and Snow Capped Cider (Austin, CO), the first time cideries were awarded medals at the competition with support from the American Cider Association.

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2024 Great American Beer Fest Night One Recap | Standouts & Hidden Gems

What a difference a year can make.

By 9 p.m. of last year’s Thursday night opening session, I had navigated most of the festival floor and left feeling underwhelmed, confused, and a bit dejected. After covering the biggest and best beer festival in the country for 11 years, the 2023 Great American Beer Festival, to put it politely, felt a bit stale.

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2024 GABF Guided Routes | Fruit-Forward, N/A Beers & Ciders to Try at GABF

The Great American Beer Festival is finally back! With the insane multitude of beers being served on the festival floor, it can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. So PorchDrinking is once again here to help you navigate that lineup and help with planning your route at the fest. As part of that research, we’ve sifted through every beer pouring at this year’s fest to curate a series of themed routes to help you plan for your GABF based on various styles and flavors.
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2024 GABF Guided Routes | Best Barrel-Aged & High ABV Beers to Try at GABF

The Great American Beer Festival is finally back! With the insane multitude of beers being served on the festival floor, it can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. So PorchDrinking is once again here to help you navigate that lineup and help with planning your route at the fest. As part of that research, we’ve sifted through every beer pouring at this year’s fest to curate a series of themed routes to help you plan for your GABF based on various styles and flavors.

Earlier this week we featured the best Non-Alcoholic beers at the fest, and this morning we featured lower ABV Lagers, but now we turn up the octane to Barrel-Aged & high ABV beers. This year’s most prolific barrel-aged producers at the festival include 3 Floyds, Firestone Walker, Fremont, Maplewood, More Brewing, Modern Times, Pure Project, Revolution, River North Brewery, and WeldWerks to name a few.
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2024 GABF Guided Routes | Spontaneous / Wild / Sour Beers to Try at GABF

The Great American Beer Festival is finally back! With the insane multitude of beers being served on the festival floor, it can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. So PorchDrinking is once again here to help you navigate that lineup and help with planning your route at the fest. As part of that research, we’ve sifted through every beer pouring at this year’s fest to curate a series of themed routes to help you plan for your GABF based on various styles and flavors.

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2024 GABF Guided Routes | Hoppy Beers to Try at GABF

The Great American Beer Festival is finally back! With the insane multitude of beers being served on the festival floor, it can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. So PorchDrinking is once again here to help you navigate that lineup and help with planning your route at the fest. As part of that research, we’ve sifted through every beer pouring at this year’s fest to curate a series of themed routes to help you plan for your GABF based on various styles and flavors.

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BREAKING | 2025 WeldWerks Invitational Festival Returns in February

After taking a two-year hiatus, the WeldWerks Invitational, one of the country’s premiere showcases of rare and specialty beers is primed to return on February 8, 2025. Next year’s festival … Read More

2024 GABF Guided Routes | Best Lagers to Try at GABF

The Great American Beer Festival is finally back! With the insane multitude of beers being served on the festival floor, it can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. So PorchDrinking is once again here to help you navigate that lineup and help with planning your route at the fest. As part of that research, we’ve sifted through every beer pouring at this year’s fest to curate a series of themed routes to help you plan for your GABF based on various styles and flavors.

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2024 Denver Rare Beer Tasting Pour List Still Brings the Heat

GABF week is finally upon us, and with it returns one of the industry’s best festivals focused on showcasing rare and specialty beers. While the Great American Beer Festival itself does a great job of bringing together the largest collection of beers from around the country into one three-day event, Rare Beer has historically showcased quality and this year is no different.

And while this year’s event does include some slight updates including a move to Thursday, October 10 from 12 p.m. – 4 p.m. instead of its usual Friday slot, and a new location in Bierstadt Lagerhaus, both changes bode for the better.

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The Complete PorchDrinking 2024 GABF Week Events Guide

Start prepping your livers accordingly because the Great American Beer Festival (GABF), the largest beer festival in the country, is set to return October 10-12, 2024. And while the festival itself serves as the ultimate showcase of craft beer across three jam-packed sessions, what happens outside of the Convention Center has evolved into a spectacle in and of itself. Throughout the years a multitude of external beer events have popped up at breweries, beer bars, restaurants and more offering beer fans a unique opportunity to explore rare and exciting new beers from breweries not typically available in the state of Colorado but also serve to showcase some of the best that the state of Colorado can offer.
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2024 GABF Out-of-State Beer Drops Available in Denver

When the Great American Beer Festival returns to Denver each year, beer fans benefit not just from the festival itself, but also from the myriad of tap takeovers, mini-festivals, beer dinners, and also specialty beer drops from out-of-state breweries.

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I Can Fight Cancer Beer Festival Oct. 5

Craft beer enthusiasts have countless festivals to attend. Many of them are just for fun. Some of them support great causes. But few seem to be driven by so much passion, love and determination as the I Can Fight Cancer Beer Festival, which takes over where F*ck Cancer left off last year. Read More

2024 Bourbon & Beyond Festival Pairs Elite Musical Lineup with World-Class Distilleries

Over the past decade, we’ve had the opportunity to attend some of the country’s best music, culinary, and craft beverage festivals. However, while most festivals specialize in one discipline over another, it’s rare to find an event that checks multiple boxes, and even rarer for one to check all three. But as massive festivals continue to evolve to remain relevant toward festival-goers who have seen and tasted it all, offering an elevated experience for everyone is a surefire way to make some noise.

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Event Recap | HOMES Nucleate Fest

HOMES Brewery hosted Nucleate 2024 on June 8 at Veteran’s Memorial Park in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The festival was a well-executed event benefitting charity, full of fun times and delicious beers.

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Most Outstanding Beers from the 2024 Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Festival

As throngs of attendees patiently huddled shoulder to shoulder in a scene more reminiscent of the starting line to a marathon than the kick-off to beer festival, an palpable buzz … Read More

Pour List Preview | Can’t-Miss Beers at the 2024 Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Festival

Among all of the innumerable reasons why the Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Festival sits firmly atop the pantheon of the nation’s best beer festivals, it would be irresponsible to ignore the most obvious element… the beer. Throughout the years, brewmaster, Matt Brynildson and the Firestone Walker team have spared no expense in ensuring the best festival-going experience, not just for attendees, but more importantly for the world’s best brewers.

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2024 Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Festival Adds Local Flare to Up Its Fest Experience

The Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Festival has perennially proven why it endures as one of the country’s premier craft beer festivals. Elements that have distinguished it above the thousands of other festivals that take place each year range from the festival’s carefully curated list of participating breweries along with brewers/founders who make the trip to interact with attendees, its stellar lineup of food purveyors, dishing out all-you-can-taste high-level culinary bites ranging from charcuterie to lobster rolls, mac and cheese to artisan ice creams, its inherent advantages of showcasing one of the country’s preeminent brewing campuses located in the picturesque setting surrounded by the natural splendor of wine country, special festival-only Firestone Walker beers; with too many more to list.

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