“So where were we going to get the beer? That was our biggest concern,” Papazian said. “There was no literature, no stories had been written about different breweries. It just wasn’t part of the culture here in the United States to consider beer something you could talk about and write about and become interested in.”
Every brewer invited to the inaugural Great American Beer Festival in 1982 was asked to bring two beers that were not light lagers. The goal was to introduce drinkers to something they might not find in the typical American beer aisle. More than 20 breweries poured samples at inaugural Great American Beer Festival, which took place in a 5,000-square-foot ballroom at a hotel in Boulder in 1982. In 2022, the festival floor will be 389,000 square feet. About 750 people attended the inaugural Great American Beer Festival in Boulder in 1982.
“I think our pale ale got the No. 1 in consumer choice,” Grossman said, “and I want to say our porter might have gotten second.”was judged by professionals; earning a medal here became one of the beer world’s most prestigious accolades. In 2022, judges will have sampled 9,680 entries to crown winners in 97 style categories.
Long before he was Denver’s mayor, Colorado’s governor and now a U.S. senator, Hickenlooper had caught the home-brewing bug during a stint working at a sardine factory in Maine and then later as a college student. He was looking for ways to save money, and it turned out that buying the ingredients to make beer was cheaper than buying the finished product.
“We thought, someday these brewpubs will be popular and someday there will be 500 breweries. We thought we were crazy,” Hickenlooper said. “It’s become this phenomenon, and Denver and Colorado have been at the center of it. But the Great American Beer Festival was a big part of what made that happen.”Volunteer Heidi Clark serves beer at the 36th Great American Beer Festival at the Colorado Convention Center on Sept. 22, 2018.