For a few weeks, in The Lauter Tun's weekly newsletter, it was postulated that Nebraska Brewing Company may well be the most award winning brewery in Nebraska. Well, I think the recent results at the North American Brewer's Association are likely to have sealed up that honor nice and tight. NBC won six, count em, six medals! That includes two golds for Brunette Nut Brown and EOS Hefeweizen, two silvers for Barrel Aged Hop God and Melange a Trois, and two bronzes for Infinite Wit and Hop God.
For all the final round results, click here.
Congratulations Paul, Kim, Tyson, and Sam!
3 comments:
Good for NBC but the wins must be somewhat qualified. The north american brewers assoc contest is not anywhere in the realm of world beer cup or gabf. For example, Anheuser-Busch won 9 medals, Bastone Brewery (who?) won 6, Sam Adams won 13, Montana brewing ( not big sky) won 9, and Pelican brewing (again...who?) won 6 just to name a few of the other big award winners at the NABA contest. So again congrats for the wins but 6 medals from this contest doesn't add up to 1/10th of one medal from world beer cup or gabf, which NBC has won before, so anyways. Just my two cents.
I apologize for not having perfect info here but I can get us pretty close. GABF had roughly 4,000 beers in competition in 2012 and while the NABA numbers have not yet been published, they should have come in at roughly 1,600 to 1,800 entries based upon some marginal growth year over year.
If we're going purely on math - this competition had approximately 45% the number of entries in fewer categories.
Approximately 8% of entered beers medaled in NABA with 6.4% medaling at GABF.
This competition did indeed field a very large list of entries and provides some pretty stiff competition.
Pelican is one of the nation's finest small brewpubs and if I'm not mistaken, has been awarded the GABF Small Brewpub of the Year distinction at least twice.
I wouldn't take away from this that simply due to a lack of name recognition on some of the brewers that they must not make good beers and thus the competition is slighted. In a field of 1,600 to 1,800 - these are indeed some exceptionally well made creations.
I would encourage you to look at that list again and look for the big names that did appear, realize that there are indeed big names that entered but didn't medal, and absolutely cheer on these new breweries that have just planted themselves in the spotlight for making some fantastic stuff.
Cheers!
Sorry but naba is in alot of ways an industry competition that allows a lot of brewers (like anheuser, coors, sam adams, etc) to say they've won awards and use those awards for marketing. I agree there were quite a few good/great breweries represented at the naba competition but when you take the overall representation of the breweries and quality of beers present at naba vs world beer or gabf it's not even close. I too looked at the list of winners and the fact that anheuser won 9 medals says a lot.
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