The Best Breweries to Visit at the Great American Beer Festival

If you’re looking for some good beer this weekend, there’s no better place to be than Denver. After a two-year pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Great American Beer Festival is back and celebrating its 40th anniversary.

At the very first Great American Beer Festival in 1982, there were 24 breweries and 47 beers. In an interview, Chris Papazian, GABF founder, said there was a grand total 40 craft breweries in the entire U.S. that first year. So participation was actually pretty good.

“It worked really, really well,” Papazian told KUSA. “They must have thought there was a glimmer of hope for the beer business, maybe something would come out of it.”

Papazian’s glimmer of hope has become a lot brighter in the last 40 years. The 2022 event will have more than 500 breweries serving over 2,000 beers. Hosted by the Brewers Association, a trade organization for small and independent U.S. craft brewers, the festival is expecting a crowd of about 40,000 visitors between Oct. 6 and Oct. 8. For a non-member price of $95, attendees get a commemorative tasting glass and unlimited one-ounce samples. If you’re some sort of inhuman drinking machine with time on your hands, you could theoretically consume nearly 16 gallons of beer over the weekend—one ounce at a time.

The festival also includes PAIRED, a separate event where organizers pair 25 breweries with 25 chefs. The chef-brewery pairings will create a tasting menu featuring beers that won’t be available on the festival floor.

And, of course, one of our favorite parts of the Great American Beer Festival is naming the winners. Last year, 290 medals were awarded to 265 breweries in 97 different beer categories.

If you’re planning to go GABF, the sheer number of participants might be overwhelming. With more than 500 breweries, what should you try? While we believe there’s nothing better than wandering around aimlessly in a land of beer, you may want some direction. With that in mind, here are the 10 brewery booths that we’d make a beeline for at the Great American Beer Festival.

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The Best Breweries to Visit at the 2022 Great American Beer Festival