Despite their medal for Large Brewpub of the Year, Church Brew Works was unable to attend GABF 2012. In an RB thread, founder Sean Casey defends that decision:
I enjoyed reading your well thought out comments on the festival.
GABF is a both a beer competition and a Beer festival. There are two aspects of the event and ideally it is nice to intertwine the two.
The Church Brew Works opened in 1996 and attended the beer festival and participated in the festival and the competition. As an owner, I worked the booth and poured our beers the first year with our brewer and wed our beer present and were pouring the next few years. The festival became so popular that space became too tight and if you did not sign up early, you did not get booth space. About this time, the AOB came up with the concept of a traveling GABF Beerfest to put the event on the east coast and west coast. We were excited to be able to participate with our beer at a closer proximity to our venue but the traveling concept never really took off.
Many of our peers that opened were not/are not able to come up with the cash flow or free up the time to make it out to GABF.
The airfare, hotel costs and physical time away from the Brewery and their wives/young kids make it hard for some of our peers to attend. I was with a local Brewpub brewing friend who scrimped to get out to GABF on his own dime and got to see his smile when he won a gold for his Dunkel. His brewery could not afford to send him out, let alone buy the cooperage to send from Pittsburgh to Denver. It is a feather in every Brewers cap when they have cleared the hurdle that they have the time and wherewithal to make it to the holy grail of beer festivals.
In our case, we have opted to focus on beer events much closer to our home base where our beer is available. Our beer is only available in 90 mile radius around our city and our brewers and myself do lots of tastings and events in a much more localized region. I give Sam at Dogfish credit for being at his booth this year and pouring and not having volunteers pour for him. Having read your post and seeing our peers vote Brewer Steve Sloan Brewpub brewer of the year changes the perception of the landscape and we will look to have beers for sampling at the festival next year.
Cheers - Sean Casey founder CBW
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