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What is the Great American Beer Festival – and did CU play a role?
It is claimed to be the biggest commercial beer competition in the world.
This year’s contest, held in Denver, brought together 9,680 entries from 2,192 breweries in all 50 US states, as well as Washington DC and Puerto Rico.
And Champaign’s own Triptych brewery came home with a medal.
The 8-year-old brewery’s current flagship, “Dank Meme” took bronze in the festival’s “Juicy or Hazy Pale Ale” category, beating 130 of the remaining 132 entries.
Destihl Brewing out of Normal won gold and bronze medals in two IPA categories. The DeadHead IPA Series: TourBus beat the other 426 entrants in the biggest contest: Juicy or Hazy India Pale Ale.
Triptych co-founder Anthony Benjamin created Dank Meme right after winning gold at the 2016 World Beer Cup for “Little Secret”, a “beautiful crisp and clear hoppy lager.”
“At the time, I had heard about these really foggy and murky beers coming out all at once, especially on the east coast, so I thought about making one as a joke, and called it” Dank Meme “because I thought there was no way there was anything,” Benjamin said.
And he lived to regret it: Dank Meme became the company’s most popular beer, winning awards at other beer festivals in the Pacific Northwest. The Triptych production plant is nicknamed “The Memery” for the number of cans it produces.
The Great American festival has a particularly rigorous judging process. This year, for 17 days and 34 sessions, 170 judges selected their three best beers from 97 individual categories. Less than 3% of applications were rewarded.
Each brewery contributes around four or five beers to be judged by the judges, usually a month and a half before the competition, which gives “a pretty good confidence that it will be a stable product and that it will not change too much before trying it. “said Benjamin. .
“We’ve won awards before, but it’s kind of a bucket list moment for us,” Benjamin said.
He sees this award as a tribute to the development of the company’s four brewers.
“It’s not like I brewed Dank Meme and sent it to the competition, we literally all have a component in every beer we make,” he said.
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