A West Oakland brewery just won big at the Great American Beer Festival

After a long, pandemic-driven hiatus, the Great American Beer Festival returned to celebrate beer making in the U.S. and the 40th anniversary of the nation’s largest professional beer competition — with 40,000 beer loving fans at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver.

When all was said, sipped and done, 20 Bay Area breweries brought home awards from the Oct. 8 awards ceremony. And West Oakland’s Ghost Town Brewing not only scored three major medals, it took home one of the biggest prizes of the day. Ghost Town was named Brewery and Brewer of the Year among breweries that annually produce between 5,001 and 15,000 barrels.

More on those medals in a minute, but first a word about the judging: The big public festival may have been nixed in 2020 and 2021, but GABF’s enormous panels of beer judges still gathered, using some COVID protocols that proved so beneficial to judges and breweries alike, we’re still using them. Not the challenging ones — judging thousands of beers while wearing a shield, for example — the good ones.

Pre-pandemic, judging was crammed into the three days just before the festival. But for the last two years, the judging process was spread over three weeks, with most people — myself included — rotating in for just a few of those days. The hosting Brewers Association discovered that stretching out the judging and doing it at a more leisurely pace not only made it go more efficiently, it allowed for more entries to be considered.

Over a span of nine days this fall, 235 judges from seven countries judged 9,939 beers — nearly 500 more than pre-pandemic — from breweries in all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The judging covered 179 beer categories, including a Pro-Am competition and a collaboration division, as well.