The Great American Beer Festival (GABF) celebrates the wild diversity of commercial beer. Tiny operations looking for exposure may find themselves next to a big mega-brewery or maybe a heavy hitter in the craft world. In recent years, one of my favorite parts is the Pro-Am booth, where they serve commercial beers made from homebrewers’ recipes.
These pro-am partnerships are great deal all around. The breweries can step outside their normal routine, taking inspiration from the creative homebrew recipes. They also build goodwill with their local homebrewing community. For the homebrewers, there’s the excitement of playing on professional equipment, plus the recognition and the chance to to share their beer with a larger audience. Seeing your beer on tap at the local tasting room is an ego boost, but it’s even more thrilling if it makes it to the big show at GABF.
This year’s winners (2017) showcase the different directions these collaborations can go. First place went to “Just Another Pretty Face” American barleywine, from the Denver Beer Company and homebrewer Doug Thiel, while second and third went to a sour smoky beer (Lichtenhainer, Black Bottle Brewery/Daniel Tomkins) and a dark sour aged on raspberries (Eluxansis, Odell Brewing/Mark Boelman). Only three beers could medal, but there were plenty of interesting, tasty choices at the Pro-Am booth.
Getting To GABF
Getting your beer there, though, is a tough challenge. The rules require that every pro-am entry starts out as an award winning homebrew. So, step one is to enter your beer into an AHA/BJCP sanctioned competition. If you want to improve your odds, read the fine-print -- the organizers will usually indicate if they’re working with their local craft brewers and maybe even give a count of opportunities. Here on the Colorado Front Range, for instance, there are a number of local comps that each yield a healthy set of pro-am partnerships.
Generally, the professional brewers make their selection from the gold medal winners, in parallel with the Best of Show judging. While technically, a bronze medal would qualify under the GABF rules, practically speaking you’ll need to take first place just to be considered. At this level, all of the beers are well-made, so it comes down to the commercial brewers and their idiosyncratic criteria. Some just go with their personal preferences, while others are more interested in choosing one their market would like. A quirky oddball may resonate with one brewery, but be of no interest to another. Most brewers try to consider whether they could reproduce the beer, but sometimes their enthusiasm glosses over the potential difficulties. Winning a homebrew competition can be somewhat subjective, but scoring a pro-am slot is even more unpredictable.
Keeping it Local
The odds may seem discouraging, but GABF’s Pro-Am Competition is not the only path to seeing your homebrew recipe in a customer’s glass. While each brewery can only enter a single Pro-Am beer, many like the idea so much that they do several collaborations a year. If you’re tapped into your local beer scene, you may have the connections to find those opportunities.
The best way to do that? Be active in your local brew club. Your club may set up events at the breweries or the brewers may drop in on the meetings. That’s a natural occasion to share your beer. Keep in mind, though, getting a compliment is not a green light to pressure them into brewing your recipe. A hard sell has little likelihood of success.
While it’s still a long shot, this casual approach does give you more control. Match a recipe with a brewery you know, let them try it and see how it goes. I’ve also had the situation where a place was familiar with my beer in general and asked if I’d like to brew something with them. That doesn’t happen out of the blue; it’s based on taking the time to connect and support them.
Golden Ticket! Now What?
Whether you win a pro-am slot for an ultimate GABF entry or your beer turned the right heads for a local release, you can look forward to a brew day on bigger equipment and the bragging rights when your beer is on tap for the public to try. Next week, we’ll talk about what it takes to scale your recipe up and we’ll set some of your expectations about your collaboration beer.