Saying Goodbye the Way it Began | 2025 GABF Night One Recap

I’ve always romanticized ending things the way they began. There’s a certain beauty in the finality of properly tying a bow around something meaningful and enduring, whether it be a decade-long series of novels, a TV series that gets its proper send-off, or, in this case, a beer publication that has existed for over 13 years and served as a medium for creativity and meaningful storytelling within the beer industry.

When I first launched PorchDrinking.com in July of 2012, I was in a pretty low place. I had just been broken up with from my longest relationship to date, and had been unsuccessful in pursuing a handful of job opportunities, when my roommate and closest friend, Chase Parker, suggested I make proper use of my melancholy-filled spare time by starting a beer blog. 

Having both relocated to Colorado in 2009-2010 to serve terms with AmeriCorps, much of our formative first few months were spent in tasting rooms like New Belgium, Odell, and Great Divide, enjoying free tasters (AmeriCorps members are paid less than minimum wage during their service to better understand the plight of the communities they serve). In bellying up to those tasting room bars and hearing about the communal nature of this upstart industry, we fell in love with craft beer and became determined to find a way to lend our own contributions. After reaching out to some journalism classmates from college and extending an invite to a few industry friends, I bit the bullet and bought the domain for PorchDrinking.com with the intent of creating a community that reflected the experience of sitting on the porch and shooting the shit with friends.

We saw beer as a medium to share stories about current events, pop culture, music, sports, and beyond, much as Bill Simmons’ Grantland website had utilized sports to reflect a greater commentary on the rest of their world. Just as everyone in 2025 has a podcast, everyone in the early 2010s had a blog, so the only iron-clad rule I enacted when starting out was that we publish at a minimum one article a day, Monday through Friday, to ensure that we establish a consistency and cadence with the non-existent audience that we foolishly dreamed would one day come to fruition. 

That naive optimism would prove useful again, a mere two months later, when on a whim, I decided to apply for a press credential to cover the Great American Beer Festival. While there was no reason for a two-month-old beer blog, which also occasionally published short fiction pieces about parking lot attendants, to be approved for coverage of the largest and most prolific beer festival in the country, for some reason, we were granted credentials. And from that moment on, out of sheer gratitude, I’ve bullishly pushed our team to provide the most complete and robust coverage of GABF each and every year since. 

And alas, here we are 13 years later, back where it all began. As we wrap day one of GABF, you may have already surmised by now that changes are afoot. One does not simply word-vomit four paragraphs of nostalgia just to go about business as usual. After 13 years of covering this incredible, but also realistically flawed industry, I’ve made the bittersweet decision to close one of the most meaningful chapters of my life by selling PorchDrinking to the good folks at The Beer Connoisseur. 

A combination of getting older and wanting to start a family, along with a greater focus on The Porch Collective, the PR firm I launched five years ago, has continued to shift more and more attention away from PorchDrinking. Finally, after a difficult summer where my wife and I lost what was to be our first child after a 14-week pregnancy, I knew it was time to more definitively re-align my priorities. 

And while I always had loftier goals for where we could take PorchDrinking, with the ultimate dream of creating a national network of regionalized pages to provide more robust coverage of the craft beer scene on a local level, I am ultimately proud of the work we accomplished. We created PorchDrinking with the goal of fostering a deeper sense of community within the industry we loved and cherished. And along the way, we’ve held firm in our resolve to tell great stories within craft beer through the lens of positivity. 

While I reflect fondly on so much of what we were able to achieve, from breaking massive stories like Breckenridge Brewery’s acquisition by Anheuser-Busch, to hosting a major GABF-week beer festival nearly three years, what I’m most proud of has been the incredible friendships and relationships we built, and the countless opportunities we provided for upstart journalists and beer industry workers. PorchDrinking alumni have gone on to launch a number of breweries, become head brewers, serve as the editor-in-chief of CraftBeer.com, become accomplished authors, and we even have one currently running for Congress in Kentucky. But at the end of the day, the greatest memories revolve around those early porch drinking sessions with friends as we debated what to call our blog, the countless numbers of bottle shares where friends came out of the woodwork to share a bottle of something they were stoked to try, and of course, reconnecting with our favorite brewers and beer friends each year at GABF to celebrate the magic and wonder of what our industry was capable of producing.

Over the next few months, we’ll begin winding down our editorial work on the site as we hand the reins over to The Beer Connoisseur team. During this process, several of our current contributing writers have expressed their interest in publishing a few final posts to extend their own final send-offs, and I also plan on recording an oral history of PorchDrinking podcast with our PorchCast crew, where we’ll reflect back on some of the wildest, most impactful, and most hilarious memories from our PorchDrinking tenure. However, it was also incredibly important for me to be able to report on GABF one last time, as we’ve done for the last 13 years. 

So as I conclude this self-indulgent, protracted farewell announcement, I only wish to extend my heartfelt gratitude to everyone who made PorchDrinking a reality. To all of the writers, editors, social media managers, photographers, and readers who helped us tell incredible stories for the past 13 years, I am eternally grateful and am so proud to call so many of your friends. 

If you came here solely for our 2025 GABF Night One Recap, Begin Reading HERE!

Now, without further ado, let’s get to our 2025 GABF night one recap. Last year, the Brewers Association made the gutsy call to introduce wholesale changes to its GABF layout by integrating “themed sections” ranging from a space-themed “Blast Off” section to a German-inspired “Prost” section. This year, they further evolved the festival format by adding a “Distillers” section, which allows attendees to sample small tastes of locally distilled spirits. 

And while some grey hairs have been vocal about the steady departure from the GABF they knew and loved, the harsh reality is that these changes weren’t introduced to court traditionalists. Much like the NFL’s decision to select Bad Bunny as next year’s Super Bowl halftime performer, changes like the introduction of spirits, N/A beverages, and themed sections aren’t meant to please everyone. Instead, they serve as a necessary evolutionary change aimed at widening GABF’s audience and ultimately keeping the festival viable for future success. 

With that said, PorchDrinking is still a beer publication, and our focus is still on the beer. This year’s Prost section is far and away the strongest collection of quality and talent at the fest. From Lager stalwarts like The Austin Beer Garden Brewery, Live Oak, and Schilling Beer, to some of the festival’s buzziest rising names like Radiant Beer, Black Stack, and Pinthouse Brewing, a stroll through the Prost section alone will satisfy any beer fanatic’s preferences alone. Appropriately located in the Prost section, one of the absolute standouts from night one was Trap Door Brewing’s Fresher than Fresh: Fresh Hop IPA. 

While remaining on the hop head train, Indiana’s Pax Verum, located in the Blast Off section, impressed with a number of hoppy beers that employed hop terpenes, including Tremendously Chill, a terpene-infused Cold IPA featuring Magnum, Idaho #7, Citra, and Simcoe hops, as well as a gelato hop terpene. And while we’re still talking about hop terpenes, Von Ebert Brewing’s (Score Section) Poetic Alchemy Terpene IPA was a can’t-miss. Ghost Town Brewing (Fright Section) continues to also wow on the IPA front, this year with their Slow Cure, Fresh Hop Citra IPA. 

On the barrel-aged beer front, Firestone Walker’s Uber Omni Gruber was an absolute revelation. This double barrel-aged Stout with coconut, hazelnut, coffee, and vanilla, brewed in collaboration with Omnipollo and FrauGruber was the show stopper of the evening. And WeldWerks Brewing’s MD Blend #2 didn’t disappoint either.

On the Lager front, BRAM’S Beer’s (Fright Section) French Pilsner was a surprising delight. Meanwhile Brewing’s (Meet the Brewer section) Meanwhile Pilsner lived up to the hype of its previous GABF medal wins. And Sierra Nevada’s newly introduced Premium Pilsner, which just hit store shelves in 8-pack 8.4oz can format, is going to be an instant crowd favorite.

A few other standouts included Michigan’s hear.say brewing, which has been open for just over a year, showcased a delightfully light and refreshing Rice Session Ale, and Phantom Farms’ Warp & Weft was an absolutely brilliant Black IPA. And don’t miss the opportunity to catch Dogfish Head’s 30 Minute, 60 Minute, 90 Minute, and 120 Minute IPAs side-by-side-by-side-by-side. 

If there’s anything to take away from this year’s festival, it’s that craft beer is alive and well. Sure, the industry has been weathering a number of headwinds in recent years, but spending a session exploring old favorites, as well as surprising newcomers, serves as a testament that beer quality and innovation continue to thrive.

Thank you once again to you, the readers, who have sustained us for so many years, and if you happen to see me in the convention hall these next two days, I’d love for you to reach out and say hi. 

The Great American Beer Festival is truly such a special experience that we in the beer industry are incredibly lucky to have. Nowhere else will you get to sample from nearly 500 breweries from across the country (and world, if you venture to the International section) for four hours. Tickets are still remaining for the last two sessions for this year’s fest, and I invite you to join me in raising a glass to celebrate craft beer.