The 2012 #GABF will have a stunning 114 more breweries than last year

You can't drink them all. Don't even try. The Great American Beer Festival, which runs October 11-13, will feature more breweries this year than ever before, and not just by one or two. See also -Great American Beer Festival scalpers drive us to drink -A GABF ticket for $50,000? The...

By Jonathan Shikes

August 16, 2012

Audio By Carbonatix

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You can't drink them all. Don't even try.

The Great American Beer Festival, which runs October 11-13, will feature more breweries this year than ever before, and not just by one or two.

There will be a whopping 580 breweries pouring sweet hop juice on the floor of the Colorado Convention Center in 2012, an astonishing 23 percent increase over 2011, when there were 466 breweries on hand.

The number of beers will also be much higher -- about 2,700, up from 2,375 in 2011, says Barbara Fusco, a spokeswoman for the Boulder-based Brewers Association, which puts on the yearly festival.

"With the increasing number of breweries in the country and the growing number of breweries that want to participate in the fest, we thought it would be a win-win to accommodate more of them," Fusco says. "At the end of the day, our goal is to create an event that is widely representative of the craft-brewing industry as a whole."

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