Grand Rapids brewery wins gold at 2026 Great American Beer Festival

Food & Drink

Oct 22

Written By Staff

Founders Brewing Co. in Grand Rapids earned a gold medal at the 2026 Great American Beer Festival for Hoppy Mood, its zero-alcohol, zero-calorie hop water. The beverage took top honors in the Hop Water category, one of several new categories introduced at this year’s competition.

Hoppy Mood is a crisp, flavorful hop water infused with botanical terpenes to enhance notes of grapefruit, tropical fruit, and pine. The beverage contains no alcohol, calories, carbohydrates, or sugar.

The 2026 Great American Beer Festival competition featured 7,267 entries from 1,300 breweries and cideries representing 49 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. A panel of 225 professional judges evaluated the entries over three days.

This year’s competition included 105 beer categories and five cider categories, with 131 subcategories. New additions included Rice Lager, Hop Water, a one-time Craft-Malt category, two Specialty beer subcategories, and three standalone categories for Gluten-Free Styles.

Winning a medal at the Great American Beer Festival is considered one of the industry’s most significant honors, recognizing brewing excellence and mastery of quality and style accuracy.

“The submissions from this year's competition continue to reflect just how far American brewing and cidermaking have come,” said Chris Williams, Competition Director for the Brewers Association. “The addition of multiple new styles and unique concepts like the ‘Craft Malt Beer’ and ‘Hop Water’ categories gave producers fresh ground to explore. The overarching quality presented by so many of the contenders underlines how intensive the judging process is and how competitively these contenders rise to the occasion with entries that pushed each category forward. GABF remains one of the most competitive stages in craft beer, and these winners represent the very best our industry has to offer. Congratulations to this year's medalists.”

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