Great American Beer Festival 2026 crowns its top breweries

The Great American Beer Festival handed out 336 medals to 243 breweries and cideries in Denver this month, and no single operation walked away with all the headlines.

The 2026 edition of the Great American Beer Festival ran October 10 and 11, judged blind by a panel of certified beer judges from the Brewers Association, the US industry group that has run the competition since 1982. Entries are split into categories by a brewery's annual production, so a 600-barrel taproom is never judged against an operation shipping thousands of barrels a year.

Fieldwork Brewing Co., based in Berkeley, California, took Brewery of the Year in the 5,000-to-15,000-barrel category. The brewery also picked up three medals: gold for Day Money NA Grapefruit Blonde, a non-alcoholic beer, and silver for both Rough & Tumble Bock Lager and High & Fine Westcoast Lager. A non-alcoholic beer anchoring a brewery's medal haul is still unusual at GABF, where hop-forward styles have historically dominated the top of the podium.

Three hundred and thirty-six medals, and still no single winner everyone agrees on.

Morgan Territory's run continues

Morgan Territory Brewing, in Tracy, California, collected its own Brewery of the Year title in a separate category, capping a year that already included California Brewery of the Year honors from the Brewers Cup of California and two medals at the World Beer Cup. Cannonball Creek, in Golden, Colorado, defended the 501-to-1,000-barrel title it also held last year.

Host-state bragging rights went to Colorado, whose breweries and cideries collected 41 medals. Oregon took the third-highest state total, with 35.

No single Great American Beer Festival champion

What the results don't produce is a single best beer in America. GABF splits its medals across dozens of style and size categories, by design: a competition judging barrel-aged stouts against session lagers on the same table would tell a brewery almost nothing useful. Unlike Munich's Oktoberfest, where the volume poured is the headline number, GABF's currency is medals, not liters.

For breweries the size of Fieldwork and Morgan Territory, a GABF win is one of the few national signals that reaches beyond their own taproom crowd — worth more in distribution meetings than in bragging rights.