Pro-Am Competition

Great American Beer Festival Pro-Am Competition

The Great American Beer Festival Pro-Am (GABF Pro-Am) competition is an opportunity for commercial breweries to team up with homebrewers to vie for top honors. The GABF Pro-Am entries are served during the Great American Beer Festival at the Pro-Am booth.

How it Works

Brewers Association member breweries are eligible to submit one entry into the GABF Pro-Am competition. Entries must be based on a homebrew recipe from American Homebrewers Association (AHA) members that have won an award in an AHA/BJCP Sanctioned Competition*. Pro-Am competition judges come from the same professional panel of world-class judges that evaluate all the beers at the Great American Beer Festival competition. However, the Pro-Am competition is separate from the GABF competition, and therefore the Pro-Am medals do not count towards GABF Brewery and Brewer of the Year awards.

While we encourage entrants in the Pro-Am competition at register to send their beer (1/6 bbl) to be served at the Pro-AM booth at the Great American Beer Festival, this is no longer a requirement for entry. If you would like to have your Pro-AM beer featured at the festival Pro-AM booth, you will need to register to send that beer via our festival donation registration platform (opens on June 4, 2025). We typically see a lot of interest for brewers to have their beers served at the Pro-AM space, so we schedule each beer to be poured at one session of the festival in order to allow for more variety and more beers to be showcased. When registering your beer for the festival you will have the option to select your preference for which session of the festival you would like to have you beer served (capacity limits apply).

Rules & Regulations for Pro-Am Competition

The Brewers Association and the American Homebrewers Association are proud to present the 18th Annual GABF Pro-Am Competition of the Great American Beer Festival. Please read all the Rules & Regulations before entering the GABF Pro-Am Competition.

Breweries may determine the homebrew recipes they scale up in one of three ways:

1. Select an award-winning homebrew from an American Homebrewers Association (AHA)/Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP)-sanctioned homebrew competition held on or after July 1 of the previous year.
2. Select an entry from your own brewery-run and/or AHA/BJCP-sanctioned competition held on or after July 1 of the previous year.
3. Partner with a local homebrew club to organize an AHA/BJCP-sanctioned competition and select an entry from that competition held on or after July 1 of the previous year*

_{*Some exceptions to the entry timeframe may be made in the case of beers requiring extended aging. The nature of the competition is entirely up to the brewery and must be timed to give the brewery adequate time to brew the beer to be ready for entry to the competition. The brewery may choose to work with an existing competition or create their own. Breweries may restrict the styles eligible for Pro-Am entry selection to styles they can reasonably brew. For example, breweries may choose not to accept recipes for fruit beers, sour beers, or beer requiring extended aging, etc. Breweries brew the winning beer from the recipe submitted by the winning homebrewer.}

Eligibility & Info

• Entry Cap: 54 entries (First come, First Served)
• Fee: $185 per entry
• All GABF eligibility rules apply to Pro-Am entries in addition to the following Pro-Am specific elements listed below
• Brewery Eligibility for Entry:
  • Breweries must have at least one other brand in the GABF competition/festival to be eligible to compete in the Pro-Am Competition. Breweries may not enter ONLY the Pro-Am Competition.
  • All brewery entrants must be members of the Brewers Association
• Homebrewer Eligibility:
  • The winning homebrewer must be an AHA member at the time the brewery enters the GABF competition (May 2025) and must have a valid AHA membership at the time of the GABF (October 2025).
  • Individual AHA members may be associated with no more than one entry submitted into the GABF Pro-Am Competition judging at the GABF.
  • The homebrewer brewing their recipe with the professional brewery cannot be, or have ever been, an employee of that brewery or on the brewing staff—which includes employees involved in the brewing process or brewing production, e.g. brewer, lab technician, cellar crew, quality control, etc.—at any brewery. Employees of the Brewers Association are ineligible.
  • See our Events Calendar for a calendar of upcoming AHA/BJCP-sanctioned competitions or go to the BJCP website to register a competition. Breweries may wish to partner with a local homebrew club or homebrew supply shop if they wish to organize their own competition.
• Beer Eligibility:
  • Limited modifications of the recipe are allowed to accommodate the scale of commercial brewing and ingredients available to the brewery.
  • Beers entered in the GABF Pro-Am competition must be commercially available. Commercially available means the entered brand has been available for sale at retail by September 3, 2025.
• Judging Info: GABF Pro-Am entries compete in best-of-show-style judging using the GABF Style Guidelines and a combination of BJCP and GABF judge panels are used for the judging. Entering brewers must provide the appropriate GABF category name and number along with any requested supplemental information for the entry to be judged correctly. Entries that do not include this information will not be accepted.
  • Judges will determine the top three entries in the GABF Pro-Am Competition, which are awarded Gold, Silver, and Bronze GABF Pro-Am Competition medals during the GABF awards ceremony.
  • Medals are issued to both the winning brewery and the winning homebrewer.
  • The Pro-Am medals do not count towards Brewery of the Year awards, and therefore, are not counted for Brewery of the Year points.
• Licensing Agreement: All entrants, both professional and amateur brewers, must sign a Licensing Agreement prior to the submission of entries to the GABF. The Licensing Agreement limits and protects the way the GABF trademark is used.

Pro-Am Festival Beer Requirement

• If you would like to have your Pro-Am beer served at the festival, you will need to register your beer as a donation to the Pro-Am booth (opening on June 4, 2025). That beer would then be served at a designated GABF Pro-Am booth in the festival hall, thus is not counted toward the maximum number of beers that can be served at the brewery’s booth. However, the brewery may choose to offer the Pro-Am beer as one of their five festival beers at their brewery booth as well.
• Each beer entered in the Pro-Am competition is served during one of the three tasting sessions. You will have the option to select your preferred sessions (capacity limits apply) when you register to donate your beer to the Pro-AM space.

Questions?

Email the GABF events team.

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Pro-Am Sponsors

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American Homebrewers Association