Yes the judging at the GABF is highly subjective but as a brewer who medaled
this year perhaps I can provide some insights that will allay some of
Scott's fears. I work for a packaging brewery (25,000bbls pa), that ships
to 37 states. We entered beers in 7 catagories, and received one medal. As
the individual who was responsible for making sure that our samples for
judging and the kegs for the festival floor were delivered on time I can
state catagorically that we did not brew or package special samples for the
competition. Samples for judging had to be at the AB distributorship in
Denver by Friday September 6th. For a couple of months leading up to the
festival we set aside a case from each packaging run of the beers we had
entered, and during the last week of August we had a series of tastings to
pick which samples we felt were the most representative of our products and
those were our entries. FYI each of those packaging runs was of a minimum
of 1000 cases and the rest all went out into the market place.

It may also interest you to know that judges who are also brewers are not
permitted to judge any of the catagories that they have entered.

From an industry perspective, what I would like to see as a future
development at the GABF, is to split some of the more heavily contested
catagories, eg, American Style Pale Ale 71 entries, and Americann IPA 94
entries into multiple classes, brewpubs and shipping breweries. I have no
hard data but I suspect that the majority of medals are going to the smaller
breweries with limited distribution and brew pubs. The positive side to
this is that there are a lot of brewpubs brewing some great beers, however
the converse is that many of these beers are brewed in small batches,
transfered to a serving tank and then drunk right where they are brewed. A
very different kettle of fish from brewing a beer in larger batches 50 - 100
bbls, that is going to be bottled and still taste good 60 days later when
the consumer picks it up from the store shelf on the other side of the
country.

Just a few rambling thoughts.