Six breweries in Dallas-Fort Worth went home with medals from the Great American Beer Festival in Denver this weekend, the largest beer competition in the country.
Windmills in The Colony was awarded the only gold medal out of all six breweries for its Mexican-style lager Sonidero in the amber lager category.
White Rock Alehouse & Brewery’s IPO IPA won a silver medal in the juicy or hazy IPA category, and the Devour Mexican Chocolate Imperial Milk Stout from 3 Nations Brewing Co. in Carrollton won a silver in the chocolate beer group.
Community earned bronze for its non-alcoholic Nada IPA, and so did the fruity Raspberry Field at Maple Branch Craft Brewery in Fort Worth and the First of His Name—a robust porter—at Edgewise Eight Brewing in Weatherford (the First of His Name is currently sold out, according to Edgewise Eight’s Instagram, but it’ll be back in stock soon).
More than 260 breweries participated in the beer competition this year in 177 different beer styles. Dallas’ White Rock Alehouse impressively placed second in one of the highest-entered categories, the juicy or hazy IPA, which had 375 entries, according to a Great American Beer Festival press release.
White Rock Alehouse brewer Blake Morrison, who’s been with the taproom since its inception in 2017, says the brewery submitted six beers to the competition, but he wasn’t expecting the IPO IPA to place because of the sheer number of entries.
“It almost feels like the Oscars of brewing,” Morrison says. “Out of 375 beers, we were blown away and very excited.”
Morrison says the IPO IPA has a double meaning: it was the first beer the brewery made for the public (the initial public offering), and an homage to the schools Morrison and owners Greg Nixon and Dave Kirk went to—Indiana University, Purdue University, and Ohio State.
IPAs are a style common in New England, and Morrison says his method for creating the IPO IPA was to emulate the best hazy IPAs he’s ever had. That meant dry hopping, or adding hops after the beer’s been fermented, to give the beer a fruit-forward flavor (like passion fruit, guava, or pineapple) without adding in any actual fruit. Morrison says it took him several recipes to get to an IPA he was happy with.
“I just kept honing in on the recipe and just tweaking a little bit here and a little bit there,” he says. “[I] finally arrived at something that I think is a perfectly balanced, but really, really hops-forward example of the style.”
In addition to the six DFW breweries, 15 others throughout the state placed in the beer competition, including six in Austin, three in San Antonio, and two in Johnson City.
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