2019 Great American Beer Fest: Lessons Learned During Our First GABF

The 2019 Great American Beer Fest is over. We attended four straight sessions– what does that mean? It means, in a 54 hour span, we spent 17.5 hours sampling over 300 different beers from 150 different breweries across the country. (We also waited in bathroom lines 13 times!) We made new friends with craft beer creators and consumers alike, we ate delicious food from food trucks– and we even successfully avoided hangovers! In short, we had a phenomenal time, and we owe our gratitude to the Brewers Association, the brewers, and all of the volunteers who put so much time and energy into making this such a magnificent event.

Since this was our first Great American Beer Fest, we made it a point to ask several people beforehand for advice on how to have the best GABF experience imaginable. Now that we’ve done four full sessions, we feel we’ve learned a number of valuable lessons about how to maximize your GABF enjoyment that we’d like to share– not only for your reading pleasure, but also so we can remember them for next year’s festival. Here are our ten biggest pieces of advice.

DON’T WAIT IN LINES.

If we can leave you with any wisdom from GABF, it’s this. Look, we waited in a few lengthy lines for hyped beers– and yes, those beers were quite delicious. However, there were *so many* incredible breweries without lengthy lines whose beers were as good as or better than the ones with the 20-minute waits. When you read our eventual article on our favorite beers at Great American Beer Fest, the vast majority of them had waits that were 90 seconds or under (we detailed a number of these in our Day 1 report). Look, if the only reason you came to GABF was to get that Sam Adams Utopia or that Weldwerks Medianoche variant, we get it. Everyone’s got a thing or two on their pour list they’re ready to wait for ten minutes to try. But keep those wait times to an absolute minimum– there’s *way* too much incredible wait-free top-shelf beer to spend time queueing.

You may be asking yourself, “But how do I find these terrific under-the-radar beers without lines? There are hundreds of breweries here!” This leads to our next point.

PREPARE.

There are things you can do to try to find those great beers that casual attendees may not be noticing. Read some of the many articles published before the festival that recommend breweries to visit. We wrote such an article, and easily more half of the breweries on that list had little to no wait time. Other publications made similar lists, like Porch Drinking and ABV Chicago— and while sure, most of us will mention Great Notion, pFriem, and other breweries bound to have hefty waits, you’ll find some winners you’d never considered as well.

Another thing you can do: go to Untappd. Untappd certainly isn’t the be-all, end-all when it comes to determining the quality of a brewery, but if you’re looking at two booths, and one brewery has a 4.1 and the other has a 3.6, odds are that score disparity isn’t completely by accident. Especially if you’re a drinker who enjoys the types of beers that get hefty Untappd scores– imperial stouts, hazy IPAs, barrel aged sours, etc.– taking the time to look up the Untappd ratings of many of the breweries you’ve never heard of is a great way to prepare. It definitely helped us find a few of our new favorites this weekend.

Finally, look at previous winners. Since not all styles of beers lend themselves to high Untappd scores, put some trust in the judges from festivals past. Lagers and kolsches, chili and spiced beers, wheats and wits: the GABF website handily has PDFs of the lists of every medal winner over the years, so you can find breweries that’ve done well with your favorite style of beer. You may not always agree, just as you may not always agree with an Untappd score– we certainly disagreed with both from time to time this trip. That said, it’s better to overprepare than it is to look at a sea of pilsner options and wonder which direction to turn.

Speaking of last year’s winners…

GO TO THE TABLES SERVING LAST YEAR’S WINNERS.

If you went to the Great Notion line on the convention center floor, you’d be waiting for some time… but if you went to the booth for last year’s winners, you could find Double Stack with a wait time of zero. Same for pFriem, where you could find their award-winner being poured even after the pFriem booth had run completely out of beer. Same for several other breweries with lengthy waits. This area was a godsend, as was the CollaBEERation area, where many of the collaboration entries were being poured. If you want tasty, interesting beer in a relatively uncrowded area without having to wait, those zones shouldn’t go unexplored.

AVOID ENDS OF AISLES WHEN YOU CAN.

While many of the bigger, more well-known breweries tend to be placed here, many of the lines tend to stretch longer here. Even when moving from region to region, if you cut through the middle of the convention center, you’re going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with folks. Circumventing the crowds by going along the edges of the convention center is a good idea: fewer crowds, water fountains for refilling your bottles, plenty of bathrooms to hit before jumping back into the fray. Some of our favorite breweries were placed at ends of aisles for this festival, so we aren’t saying they aren’t worth visiting– we’re saying carefully pick and choose your spots to avoid those crowds.

However, there’s one line you won’t be able to avoid… the entrance line.

GET THERE EARLY. FOR SOME OF YOU, VERY EARLY.

Fortunately, we were covering GABF as media and didn’t need to brave the general admission entrance line repeatedly… but Russell rolled to the festival solo on Friday night with a GA ticket. He figured if he got there an hour early, he’d be close to the front of the line… but he was super wrong. The above shot is a panorama photo of the line a full hour before the festival was set to begin. So if you want to be the first one to the hyped brewery that’s near the front entrance? 90 minutes to two hours in line for the busier nights is a must. Russell bee lined it away from the crowds near the front entrance all the way back to the Great Lakes region– he got to Speciation before the lines got big there, but the Three Floyds line was already forty to fifty people deep mere minutes past 5:30. If you’re the person who wants Three Floyds without waiting in huge lines, get there earlier than Russell did.

GO TO THE THURSDAY NIGHT AND/OR SATURDAY AFTERNOON SESSIONS.

Thursday night was, in all likelihood, the most pleasant session of the entire GABF. It was the least crowded session, and none of the beers had kicked because, well, it was Day 1. We made the mistake of waiting to tackle certain breweries on later days, only to find their big-ticket items gone– or, in some cases, the entire brewery gone. If you want specific hyped beers, get to the festival as early in the weekend as possible. The other best session is Saturday afternoon, because it’s immediately following the awards ceremony, and you can interact with many of the brewers/brewery staff basking in their win, happy to talk to you about their beers. It’s almost certainly the most gregarious session of the bunch. You have to be a member of the BA or the AHA to attend Saturday afternoon… but joining the AHA is under 40 bucks, and if you’ve read this far into a beer festival guide, odds are you’re the sort of beer nut who’d be interested in home brewing anyhow. Why not knock out two birds with one stone, join the AHA, and take in a lovely afternoon festival?

DO NOT GO TO THE SATURDAY NIGHT SESSION.

Okay, we’re overstating for effect, as going to the Saturday night session is better than going to *no* session… but by Saturday night, so many of the beers have kicked, some breweries are no longer pouring at all, and most of the brewery staffs and brewers have already left for the night. Combine that with Saturday’s nights reputation for being more rambunctious, and it’s not really the session you’re inclined to enjoy if you’re there to try craft beer from across the country. It’s a better session if you’re there to drink a lot with your friends in a convention center. Which is okay! We just doubt it’s the goal of most of the people reading this article.

DO NOT DRINK EVERY SIP YOU ARE POURED.

It should go without saying that there is more good beer being served at GABF than you can drink in a session (or even in four sessions!). It should *also* go without saying that your blood alcohol content has a ceiling, and if you cross that ceiling, it increases your odds of being escorted from the premises by security because you attempted to carjack the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile. Thus, if you’re given a pour from a brewery, and you give it a sip, and you think it’s anything less than stellar? Send the rest of that beer into a dump bucket, not into your belly. Every sip you take is precious at a festival like this, so make sure every sip you take is only being taken of the best possible beer. Also, Every Sip You Take is our favorite song by The Police.

EAT SOMETHING.

We were *beyond* grateful that we remembered to make pretzel necklaces for this festival. It serves as a nice palate cleanser between beers, which is especially useful when sampling the occasional intense rauchbier or hot sauce taco gose (yes, you read that correctly, more on that in our coming Best of the Festival article). But more importantly, put food on your stomach to prevent your stomach from being nothing but a liquor storage vessel. Pretzels go perfectly with beer, obviously, but there are also so many food trucks and booths that you should take advantage of during your session. Take a brief pause from drinking, and do like we did Saturday afternoon: crush a massive meatball sub. Your stomach will thank you later.

THERE’S MORE TO ATTACH TO YOUR NECKLACE THAN JUST PRETZELS.

On the first day, we saw some folks with miniature bags of pretzels clipped to their necklace. We thought, “How clever.” Then we saw bags of Cheez-Its and Fritos on necklaces. Then a man with a necklace of donuts. Then a man with a necklace with several bottles of Gatorade tied to it (you’ve got to think he’s got a wicked case of rope burn on the back of his neck today). Finally, we saw the Necklace Champion: a man with a necklace sporting a gallon-sized Ziplock bag, and inside the bag… a full pizza. So if you don’t want to make a pretzel necklace because you don’t love pretzels, or if you do like pretzels and you just want to get super creative with your snack jewelry? Don’t be afraid to rock the boat with your accoutrements. Go ham. In fact, run your string through a whole ham and wear that as a necklace. We’re sure someone’s tried in GABFs past.

ENGAGE WITH THE COMMUNITY.

It’s possible to go through an entire session of Great American Beer Fest just drinking beer and talking to the friends with whom you came. However, we feel you’d only be experiencing a *part* of what makes GABF special. We met so many people at GABF over the course of the four sessions. We met people who work for our favorite breweries, we met people who run breweries we’d never heard of. We met some homebrewers from Atlantic City, we met some Denver locals who’ve been coming annually to GABF for over a decade. Everyone we met, from the owners of breweries cranking out 300,000+ barrels a year to the volunteers pouring at empty tables, was an absolute delight, because there’s a real sense of community prevalent at a festival of this magnitude.

At the end of the day, American craft beer isn’t about merely replicating, executing, and celebrating classic styles— it’s also about innovation and creation of new styles, new flavors, and new variations. Our goals in attending GABF are rather similar. Yes, we want to have the sorts of pilsners, IPAs, and stouts we know we love… but we also want our palates to be challenged by bold new creations that expand the way we think about beer. Yes, we want to see old friends and enjoy their company… but we also want to make new friends, to connect with new beer lovers and creators, and to push ourselves to learn more about those who make up the craft beer community at GABF. Yes, we want to drink the beers that our favorites have brought along… but we also want to find new favorites, to spread the word about those under the radar, to support the work of female and minority brewers, and to realize that great craft beer isn’t just in California, Colorado, and Oregon— many of our favorite beers from the festival came from unlikely destinations. That’s why we started our website: to seek out those places and to help travelers find the craft beer they crave wherever they may go. Festivals like Great American Beer Fest go a long way toward strengthening a nationwide craft beer community, and we hope to continue to attend to help spread the love in any way we can.