Bennett: O.C. breweries make a statement at Great American Beer Festival
Orange County’s craft beer is among the best in the country. Maybe you already surmised that just by drinking your way through your favorite local spots, but now there’s even more validation to rub in the face of doubters.
Both veteran and newcomer breweries from across Orange County won big at the 30th annual Great American Beer Festival on Oct. 8, earning top honors in four of the five most-entered categories and bringing home several other medals from the most prestigious competition for commercial beer in the nation. It’s the biggest GABF haul the county’s beer craft scene has ever seen.
Riip Beer Company, Noble Ale Works, Pizza Port San Clemente, The Bruery, TAPS Fish House and BJ’s Restaurant & Brewery (which makes beer for its restaurants at a main production facility in Brea) all earned either gold or silver medals in the GABF competition, which found judges sifting through more than 7,227 entries from 1,752 breweries across 161 beer styles.
The Bruery in Placentia continued its tradition of excellence with two wins — more than any local brewery this year — one from each end of its diverse beer portfolio.
Mischief, The Bruery’s year-round hoppy Belgian ale (and also one of its original releases), won an impressive gold medal in the American-Belgo ale category, and Wineification II, a one-off barrel-aged imperial stout made in collaboration with the winery Fess Parker, took silver in the Experimental Beer category.
“Winning a gold medal for Mischief is truly gratifying because I love this beer with my heart and soul,” The Bruery’s founder and CEO Patrick Rue said in a statement after the winnings. “If I had to compare this to anything, it would be like your child bringing home a report card with straight As and a comment from the teacher telling you your child is a genius.”
Orange County also dominated the two main categories for hoppy beer, each of which had more than 200 entries apiece. Riip Beer Company won silver in the American IPA category for Super Cali, another one of their killer IPAs, and Noble Ale Works won silver in the Imperial IPA category for Nobility, its go-to heavy-hitting bitter beer.
Earlier this year, Anaheim’s Noble was named the best small brewery in the world at the prestigious World Beer Cup, which is often referred to as “the Olympics of beer.” Riip started as a delivery-only brewery and expanded with a Huntington Beach tasting room last year.
Several O.C. institutions with long histories of competition-winning beer also added more medals to their already sagging walls.
Pizza Port San Clemente, which is part of the San Diego brewpub empire that lets each location make its own beers, won its 10th medal in as many years — a silver in the highly competitive coffee beer category for Dusk ‘Til Dawn.
BJ’s Restaurant & Brewery, a Huntington Beach-based craft beer pioneer that has since moved brewing operations out of individual restaurants and into regional production plants, won a medal for a beer brewed at its Brea facility. Razz-Jerry Tart took gold in the Fruited Wood-and Barrel-Aged Sour Beer category.
And TAPS Fish House and Brewery — one of the most decorated brewpubs in the nation with more than 20 GABF medals and three mid-sized brewpub of the year titles — earned a gold for the soon-to-be-released Silent Warrior, a barrel-aged strong ale that will be sold as a benefit to a retreat that caters to special operations forces returning home from deployment.
GABF records lists Silent Warrior as being produced at TAPS’ Corona location, but the original Brea brewpub is where the beer legacy all began and it shares the stellar brewing team of David Huls, Kyle Manns and Jonathan Chiusano, so we’re counting it as a win for O.C.
Other O.C.-connected breweries also won big at this year’s GABF, with Long Beach’s Beachwood Blendery — the nerdy barrel-aging project from the same owners of Seal Beach’s Beachwood BBQ and Huntington Beach’s almost-open Beachwood Brewing — earning silver in the Belgian-Style Lambic category for its first official lambic-style release, Chaos is a Friend of Mine.
San Diego’s Karl Strauss Brewing Company, which has two locations in O.C., took home three gold medals and a silver medal, plus the title of Best Mid-Sized Brewing Company in the country.
Held every fall in Denver, GABF is the largest commercial beer competition in the world and it continues to be a symbol of brewing excellence recognized in the U.S. and beyond.
This year’s winners were chosen from a pool of entries nearly 10% higher than last year’s, surpassing all previous participation records. Competing breweries hailed from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. More than 250 beer experts from 12 countries sifted through the beers over four days, awarding nearly 300 medals to the some of the best commercial beers made in the United States.
It’s an honor to count our local beer among them.
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SARAH BENNETT is a freelance journalist covering food, drink, music, culture and more. She is the former food editor at L.A. Weekly and a founding editor of Beer Paper L.A. Follow her on Twitter @thesarahbennett.