The Great American Beer Festival Medal
notes: label: Description (Brief)
content: One (1) gold medal
label: Description (Brief)
content: Gold medal attached to a red, white, and blue ribbon. "The Great American Beer Festival"
label: Description
content: This medal was won by brewers at San Francisco, California’s Anchor Brewing Company in 1988, for a Porter beer submitted to annual competition at the Great American Beer Festival (GABF). Charlie Papazian, founder of the American Homebrewers Association, the homebrewing journal Zymurgy, and the Association of Brewers, also founded GABF, an event that became the nation’s largest beer competition. At the first GABF, held in Boulder, Colorado, in 1982, twenty-four breweries poured forty-seven beers for eight hundred attendees. At the event, Anchor Brewing Co. representatives poured samples of Anchor Steam Beer and Anchor Porter. GABF grew larger as the microbrewing and craft industry exploded. By 2019, the number of attendees at GABF totaled more than 60,000 people, with more than 2,000 breweries pouring more than 4,000 beers. Between 1983 and 1997, Anchor Brewing Co. beers won twenty medals at GABF, including gold medals for its Old Foghorn Barleywine (1991, 1989), Christmas Ale (1989), and Anchor Porter (1988).
label: Description
content: In 1965, Fritz Maytag III purchased the historic but struggling Steam Beer Brewing Company (later, Anchor Brewing Company). With his entrepreneurial roots and zeal for science, Maytag revitalized the brewery. He perfected the brewery’s recipe for steam beer, an effervescent style that had originated in nineteenth-century San Francisco, and brewed European styles—porter, barleywine, pale ale—then unfamiliar to many Americans. As a self-taught brewer and savvy entrepreneur, Maytag inspired many who dreamed of opening their own small breweries. Historians consider Anchor Brewing Company to have been the first post-Prohibition American microbrewery. Microbreweries, brewpubs, and “craft” breweries proliferated throughout the nation in the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. In August 2023, Sapporo USA liquidated Anchor Brewing Company.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Work and Industry: Food Technology
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Gift of Anchor Brewing Company through Mike Minami
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2023.0113.31
label: accession number
content: 2023.0113
label: catalog number
content: 2023.0113.31
objectType: label: Object Name
content: medal
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 17 in x 2 in; 43.18 cm x 5.08 cm