Great American Beer Festival Adds 7 New Beer Styles To Awards List

The Brewers Association, the trade association representing America’s small and independent breweries, annually organizes and hosts both the Great American Beer Festival, which, in addition to a public beer festival, gives awards to the best beers brewed in America, and the World Beer Cup, the largest beer competition in the world.

How New Categories Get Decided

“We have a forum to get ongoing feedback. That includes beer judges and brewers,” said Chris Williams, competition director at the Brewers Association in a telephone interview. The Association’s style guidelines are indicative of beer styles currently brewed by American craft breweries, driven both by increasing popularity of historic beer styles, or newly invented beer styles. The forum discusses increasingly popular beer styles, which the Association then monitors, adding them to its style guidelines when it deems them worthy.

In this way, the Association’s style guidelines are reflective of the beer market, rather than trying to be prescriptive. But once a beer style has been identified by the Association as being popular enough to merit its own category in the guidelines, “it helps breweries and consumers to know what to expect,” said Williams. The Association’s style guidelines provide not only sensory descriptions of beer styles, but technical parameters, such as alcohol content, color and hop levels.

“We are an American association, so our style guidelines reflect this market,” said Williams. While the Association continuously monitors market trends, the style guidelines are typically only updated once per year, ahead of the Great American Beer Festival. This allows breweries wanting to enter beers into the competition time to react to the guidelines.

Why Beer Style Guidelines Matter

The Brewers Association Beer Style Guidelines are used to judge beers at the Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Cup, both of which are organized by the Brewers Association. Judges award beers for adherence to the style guidelines, as well as overall quality of the beer. Breweries entering beers into the competition choose which category they wish the beer to be judged as, so an otherwise great tasting beer might not win an award if it does not adhere to the guidelines of the category in which it is entered.

The Brewers Association Beer Style Guidelines are different from the BJCP Beer Style Guidelines which are published by a different organization geared more toward homebrewing, though the BJCP guidelines are often used in commercial beer competitions as well. While the Brewers Association updates its style guidelines annually, the BJCP last updated its style guidelines in 2021.

The new additions to the Brewers Association Beer Style Guidelines are:

• Four styles—Light, Pale, Amber, and Dark—that represent the range of Mexican-Style Lager. These beers had previously been included within larger, more ambiguous lager categories for the Great American Beer Festival competition, but the Brewers Association says the uniqueness and growing popularity of these styles warrants individual guideline recognition.
• Czech-Style Amber Lager and Czech-Style Dark Lager. The distinctive side-pour faucet used to dispense Czech-style beers has created renewed brewer and consumer interest in these traditional beers. Along with the addition of these two styles to the guidelines, the category formerly known as Bohemian-Style Pilsener has been renamed as Czech-Style Pale Lager.
• Representing the constant innovation that is a hallmark of independent brewers, the Brewers Association has recognized West Coast-Style Pilsener as a new style that balances the fresh, assertive expression of Pacific Northwest and Southern Hemisphere hops with the character and drinkability of a pilsner.

With these additions, the Brewers Association will now award medals in 108 beer categories at the Great American Beer Festival, being held in Denver, Colorado from October 9 to 12, 2025.