Great American Beer Festival

During the early 1980s, the United States saw the development of a market demand and surge in interest in brewing beer in the home, a practice long treasured by the British and Australians. This coincided with an interest in the development of small breweries springing up on the West Coast of the United States and in the states of Oregon and Colorado. One of the first people to seek to promote the development of the home-brewing market was a man named Charlie Papazian.

In 1981 Papazian went to the United Kingdom and attended the Great British Beer Festival. The festival was a celebration of the development of the “campaign for real ale” (CAMRA) that developed in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s as a reaction to the consolidation of the brewing industry in England and the loss of independent traditional breweries. The festival so impressed Papazian that he became determined to accomplish the same thing in the United States.