The Oregon Growers Cup returns for its twelfth year on December 12, 2026, at 454 Gravel Pit Lane in Riddle, Oregon. It runs noon to 6 PM and it is blind-judged: the panel never sees a brand name or a strain name before it scores. Awards span flower, solventless, hash, edibles and more.
What the Cup Actually Is
This is a competition first and a gathering second. Categories run deep — Indoor Flower, Home Grow and Medical, PreRoll, Infused PreRolls, Edibles, Solventless, BHO, CBD Extracts, Hash, Drinkables, Carts and Topicals. A separate GrowMaster bracket judges the growing itself across Indoor, Outdoor and Greenhouse.
That Home Grow and Medical category is worth flagging. Most cups are licensed-brand showcases; keeping a homegrown lane open is a deliberate choice about who the Oregon scene includes, and twelve years in, it is clearly not an afterthought.
How the Judging Works
Entries are judged blind by curated industry peers — judges do not see brands or strain names. Scoring runs on taste, look, smell and high. Products are lab tested, and the cup runs storage and chain-of-custody protocols on entries rather than passing jars around and hoping.
Blind judging plus chain of custody is the part that separates a real cup from a marketing exercise. When the panel cannot see the label, a big name cannot buy a placement, and that is the whole reason a Cup result is worth putting on a jar.
Where It Lands and When
Saturday, December 12, 2026, noon to 6 PM, at 454 Gravel Pit Lane, Riddle, Oregon 97469. Riddle sits in Douglas County in southern Oregon, off I-5 between Roseburg and Grants Pass — this is a southern-Oregon farm-country event, not a Portland convention hall.
The High Rise Take
Ngaio Bealum hosts, which tells you the room is not going to be a stiff awards banquet. He came up through comedy and Netflix's "Cooking on High," and a cup that hands him the mic is signalling what kind of night it wants to be.
Twelve years is a long run for a regional cup, and the ones that last that long usually do it by being straight about the judging. Oregon's outdoor and greenhouse growers rarely get a national stage. This is theirs, and the GrowMaster bracket is the clearest sign the cup takes cultivation seriously as its own craft.
Getting In
Cup entry, membership and ticket details are handled through the organizer directly, and the awards day itself is tied to membership access. Check the official site for current entry deadlines, membership tiers and what admission includes before you plan the drive.