Since I moved here, I’ve been meaning to subject the Australian International Beer Awards to the same analysis that I do for the competition back home. But a mix of feeling less familiar with the industry here and the vastly bigger-and-messier dataset has derailed me. Until now. There’s a lot to unpack, but a little statistics can provide a better context for the results you might’ve seen promoted recently — and an effective antidote to spin and preconceived ideas about who makes “good” beer.

Because there’s a list of every beer entered,¹ not just those that win medals, we can calculate some ‘batting averages’ to better compare how each brewery fared. So, I’ve worked out each entrant’s medal percentage (MPC: how many of their beers won a medal, of any kind) and their points per entry (PPE: adding 3 for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze, then dividing by number of entries submitted). Bigger numbers are better in both cases; overall about 74% of beers entered earned a medal,² and if your PPE was 1.00 or higher your brewery was in the top half of the competition. The table below focuses on breweries who entered ten or more beers, since that cuts out the noisier end of the data and keeps it manageable to look at;³ I’ll also highlight some interesting performances that are below that cutoff as we go.

Performance at the 2024 AIBAs, by breweries entering ten or more beers (or winning a Championship title)

n = number of entries, MPC = medal percentage, PPE = points per entry, G/S/B = individual medals, 🏆 = brewery Champion titles, 🍺 = beer Champion titles, all entrants Australian unless noted

Brewery	n	MPC	PPE	G	S	B
Brick Lane (🏆 Large Aust., 🏆 Victorian)	61	90.2	1.72	12	26	17
Kaiju! (🏆 Medium Aust.)	18	100.0	2.00	6	6	6
Hawkers	19	84.2	1.68	6	4	6
Garage Project (NZ) (🏆 Large Int'l., 🍺 Int'l.)	14	92.9	2.07	6	4	3
Bodriggy	14	92.9	1.86	5	3	5
Three Sisters (NZ) (🏆 Small Int'l.)	30	83.3	1.40	4	9	12
4 Pines	27	77.8	1.41	4	9	8
King Road (🏆 Small Aust.)	7	100.0	2.43	4	2	1
Behemoth (NZ) (🏆 Medium Int'l.)	21	95.2	1.76	3	11	6
Stone & Wood (🍺 Australian)	22	77.3	1.41	3	8	6
Blackman's	19	84.2	1.53	3	7	6
Seeker	13	100.0	1.92	3	6	4
Altitude (NZ)	16	81.3	1.44	3	4	6
Hong Kong Beer Company (China)	12	91.7	1.75	3	4	4
Moffat Beach	10	90.0	1.90	3	4	2
Rebellion	14	85.7	1.50	3	3	6
BentSpoke	13	84.6	1.46	3	2	6
Matilda Bay	12	66.7	1.33	3	2	3
Bridge Road	10	90.0	1.60	3	1	5
TWØBAYS	10	70.0	1.30	3	0	4
Mountain Goat	25	80.0	1.36	2	10	8
Reckless	21	90.5	1.57	2	10	7
Philter	18	88.9	1.61	2	9	5
Coopers	25	76.0	1.24	2	8	9
Balter	17	100.0	1.71	2	8	7
The Grifter	17	100.0	1.71	2	8	7
Burleigh	14	92.9	1.71	2	7	4
Bucketty's	19	94.7	1.47	2	6	10
Green Beacon	14	78.6	1.50	2	6	3
Pirate Life	11	100.0	1.91	2	6	3
Margaret River Beer Co.	18	94.4	1.44	2	5	10
Rocky Ridge	15	80.0	1.33	2	4	6
Beerfarm	10	100.0	1.70	2	3	5
Dollar Bill (🏆 "Gypsy" brewer)	5	80.0	1.80	2	1	1
Stomping Ground	14	92.9	1.64	1	8	4
Deeds	15	93.3	1.53	1	7	6
Felons	14	92.9	1.57	1	7	5
Wolf of the Willows	13	76.9	1.38	1	6	3
Black Brewing Co.	15	80.0	1.20	1	4	7
Esker	11	72.7	1.27	1	4	3
NBeer (China)	11	81.8	1.27	1	3	5
Thorny Devil	14	57.1	0.93	1	3	4
Jetty Road	10	60.0	1.10	1	3	2
Mount Brewing Co. (NZ)	10	80.0	1.20	1	2	5
Beerland	13	53.8	0.85	1	2	4
Outer Range (USA) (🏆 New Exhibitor)	3	100.0	2.33	1	2	0
King River Brewing Co.	15	60.0	0.80	1	1	7
No-Li Brewhouse (USA)	10	30.0	0.60	1	1	1
Fixation	14	64.3	1.14	0	7	2
White Lakes	13	84.6	1.31	0	6	5
Bright	12	91.7	1.33	0	5	6
Carlton & United (Yatala brewery)	10	80.0	1.30	0	5	3
Sydney Brewery	16	68.8	0.94	0	4	7
Slipstream	14	64.3	0.93	0	4	5
Black Hops	10	90.0	1.30	0	4	5
Shelter	12	66.7	1.00	0	4	4
Sunshine Brewery (NZ)	12	66.7	1.00	0	4	4
Cheeky Monkey	10	80.0	1.20	0	4	4
Burnley	11	63.6	1.00	0	4	3
Watts River Brewing	11	81.8	1.09	0	3	6
Jervis Bay	10	80.0	1.10	0	3	5
Future Magic	11	63.6	0.91	0	3	4
Spoetzl (USA)	10	50.0	0.80	0	3	2
Brightstar	10	40.0	0.70	0	3	1
Freshwater	13	84.6	1.00	0	2	9
Endeavour / Pinnacle Drinks	29	34.5	0.41	0	2	8
Nail Brewing	17	52.9	0.65	0	2	7
Mahou / San Miguel (Spain)	12	66.7	0.83	0	2	6
Hawkesbury	10	80.0	1.00	0	2	6
Sunday Road	12	41.7	0.58	0	2	3
Coles Liquor	10	30.0	0.50	0	2	1
Feral	10	60.0	0.60	0	0	6

These are the Champions (and they mostly did very well)

Eleven different “Champions” are crowned at the AIBAs, and it gets a little confusing and unwieldy. Stone & Wood’s ‘Hinterland Big Pale’ (pictured above) won Champion Australian Beer — determined by a final taste-off with the other local trophy winners (Best Pilsner, Best Modern Pale Ale, etc.) — and soaked up plenty of media coverage as a result.⁴ But Stone & Wood the brewery didn’t fare so well; several gold medals out of contention for a “Champion brewery” title,⁵ with MPC and PPE only slightly better than average and nothing to write home about in context — all while their flagship Pacific Ale failed to earn a medal. It’s the perfect example of how bad news can hide behind good news.

Probably the most-obvious thing from the table is how far an outlier Brick Lane are; entering vastly more beer than anyone else, but also earning twice the golds of any other brewery and a heavy pile of other medals. The reason I started these analyses was to show that some breweries ‘brute force’ their way to victory, since there’s no penalty for a beer that fails. But that is absolutely not what Brick Lane are doing here, as you can see from their very creditable MPC and PPE, and the broad base of beers that did well for them, from everyday crowd-friendly stuff to an impressive run of barrel aged stouts. For such a large brewery, it’s striking that about a third of the beers they entered have no online presence at all, and a few others are in the single digits for check-ins on Untappd. To me, that strongly suggests they’re entering a lot of very small-batch stuff, perhaps only available at their onsite taproom — open two afternoons a week, in a remote Melbourne industrial park.⁶ That would begin to strain the spirit of the rule that entries must be “commercially available”,⁷ though it is worth noting that even if you deleted all those ‘ghost’ beers from their winnings, they’d still be Champion in the ‘Large’ brewery tier.

The two other Australian Champions, Kaiju (Medium) and King Road (Small), both turned in even sharper performances, each winning a trophy in a hotly-contested category (Pilsner and Traditional IPA, respectively), and earning medals for every single beer they entered — with Kaiju doing so with more beers than anyone else who managed the same feat. King Road’s PPE was almost the best in the entire competition, bettered only by a handful of breweries who put forward just one or two beers each. Meanwhile, Dollar Bill won the “Gypsy” category for the third year running, but I’ll come back to the question of who they might’ve been up against later.⁸

All three international Champions were from New Zealand — and each also won in 2023. On their way to defending their title, Garage Project collected the Champion International Beer trophy with ‘Chance, Luck & Magic’, and were one of only 14 entrants (out of 396) to register a PPE over 2.00. Behemoth and Three Sisters weren’t quite as strong, but still performed much better in MPC and PPE terms here in Australia than they ever have done on their home turf. Both have previously seemed to opt for the ‘brute force’ method of winning a title with lots of entries and a relatively low hit rate,⁹ and while they’ve done better here, it’s still surprising that a small brewery in Taranaki fielded the second-highest number of beers in the entire competition. The sole non-Australasian ‘Champion’ this year was the Best New Exhibitor, Colorado’s Outer Range — who were founded in 2016, but “new” here refers to their first time entering the AIBAs, and that title is essentially awarded on PPE. 2.33 is a very good score, and though it was only off three entries (all IPAs), that’s the kind of laser-focused high performance I’ll always applaud.

Undercelebrated performances (and reality checks)

Good news can also hide within bad news. For example, Revel — perhaps unfairly neglected from my table because they only entered 9 beers — would rocket into sixth place overall if you sorted the field by medals (they won 5 golds, and had one fewer silvers than Bodriggy), arriving there with a perfect MPC and one of the highest PPEs of the year at 2.33. Urban Alley and Hawke’s aren’t far behind, with fewer golds but both likewise scoring 100 MPC with PPE of 2.11 and 2.00 respectively, also off 9 entries each. Moon Dog earned an even higher PPE of 2.40, from five beers which all medaled. And indeed, you can see from the table above that Balter, Grifter, Seeker, Pirate Life and Beerfarm all entered at least ten beers and won medals with every one, with very respectable PPEs at the same time. Such performances are all too easily overlooked when they don’t come with a title and it’s not hard to find really solid scores from breweries that don’t get much respect in some circles.

Two particular breweries make a good case study in reputation and results: the average Melbourne-based beer “fan” would talk of Deeds with reverence¹⁰ and look down their nose at Bodriggy. But if you sort the table above by MPC, you’ll see they’re within one point (with only one failing beer each), and it’s Bodriggy who have the better PPE, and enough extra golds that they damn near wrestled the Championship out of Kaiju’s hands.¹¹ This kind of thing is why I often encourage people to try things ‘blind’ occasionally — since you’ll pretty frequently surprise yourself and like (or dislike) something contrary to your own expectations. It’s also a nice reminder that beer can be “good” in several ways and to keep in mind that awards focus on technical precision and faithfulness to style and it is obviously okay to base your choices on other factors. But “crap beer” does not do well at competitions, and it’s pointless to dismiss the results because your favourite didn’t win.

A lot of the current “hype” breweries sat out the competition entirely, so there’s no way see how their stuff fares when tasted blind against their peers. There’s nothing here from Future, Found, Fox Friday,¹² Bracket, Wildflower or Working Title, for example. Mountain Culture didn’t submit anything either this year, perhaps deciding their huge push to dominate the Hottest 100 (awarded by popular vote instead) is more worth their time. A few breweries in what might be their late-hype era — Rocky Ridge, Range, One Drop — were present and did pretty well, but there’s no way to slice the data in which any of them come out on top here.

And you might’ve noticed that Brick Lane were also awarded Champion Victorian Brewery, but no other states got a special category — presumably because the AIBAs are always hosted here and the organisers were formerly known as the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria. If the other states and territories had a parallel award, the winners would’ve been Bentspoke (ACT), Moo Brew (Tas.), Coopers (SA), King Road (WA), Revel (Qld.), and 4 Pines (NSW)¹³ — most by pretty comfortable margins, the closest runner-up being Pirate Life in South Australia.

Indies and conglomerates (and retailers)

The other big nation-wide beer competition is The Indies,¹⁴ run by the Independent Brewers Association — but their members still produce a huge proportion of the Australian beers contesting the AIBAs; something like 80%, despite their combined market share of less than 10%. And once I’d worked that out, naturally I had to check how they (collectively) performed, compared to the local duopoly.¹⁵

Ownership status	Entries	MPC	PPE
IBA member	1012	79.0	1.31
Asahi / CUB	144	83.0	1.47
Kirin / Lion	47	76.6	1.34

Again, I think that should push back against some biases in the minds of many consumers; I’m not sure many people would think they might all be so close — nevermind have much chance at guessing the rankings by MPC or PPE. Asahi is buoyed by Balter and Pirate Life doing so well, but even their mainstream brands (like Carlton and Great Northern) were earning about 80 MPC. Back home in NZ, Lion-owned breweries are reliably stronger than their rivals, but here Fixation underperformed and dragged their average down somewhat.¹⁶ There are a lot of valid criticisms of these giant conglomerates and their business practices, but bluntly knocking them for making “bad beer” is pretty wrong-headed on these numbers.

Meanwhile, the two main liquor retailers in Australia — Endeavour (who own Dan Murphy’s and BWS) and Coles (Liquorland and Vintage Cellars) — both also have a number of “store brand” beers which they sent into the awards. These include labels like Zytho, Colossal, John Boston and Tinnies. And those are the real duds of the competition, it turns out. Even as their portfolios account for an estimated 5% of all beer sold in the country (about as much as Coopers) they earned zero gold medals, and the two companies easily had the worst MPC and PPE stats of any significant local entrants. (Morbidly curious, I checked their 2023 results, and they were just as bad.)¹⁷ They’re such an outlier that it makes me wonder who actually brews them, and what it says about the producer(s) — are they half-arsing something that isn’t going to carry their own name, or is the contracting company imposing cost constraints that lead to inferior product? There’s mention online that Brick Lane brewed the Tinnies range, for example, but that was years ago¹⁸ and it would be in stark contrast to the quality seen from them this year.

My final point is that this weirdly brings us all the way back to Dollar Bill’s possibly-predictable win in the “Gypsy Brewer” category, the weird and outdated phrase the AIBAs use for contract brewing. It’s unfortunately absent from the awards data which other breweries were eligible; another manifestation of the general lack of transparency with this mode of production.¹⁹ But other than a few real minnows,²⁰ it seems Endeavour and Coles might be most of the “competition”, here, with their sad parade of knockoffs. So while I’m sure it’s nice to have some more silverware and extra recognition, the victory must start to feel a little hollow.

And… that’s enough for now. If you’ve made it this far and found my commentary useful or entertaining (or both) odds are you know someone else who will, too. It takes a lot of work to drag some sense out of all this, and I appreciate any help in spreading the word, so the numbers can settle some arguments — and bring a little more praise (or scorn) to those who have earned it.

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1. Frustratingly, Melbourne Royal format the results booklet in a way that makes data extraction difficult —and refused to provide an export from their database when I asked — so this was a full day of pretty manual data entry. I’ve been very careful, but minor errors may remain, hopefully at a level unlikely to disturb the analysis here. I found a few errors in the booklet itself, I think, but MR wouldn’t help resolve them.
2. Remember that these competitions aren’t like the Olympics. Here, many beers can win gold in the same category; think of it like an A grade at school. To “fail” a beer is to judge it faulty in some technical sense or too far out of the guidelines for its chosen style — or both.
3. Thanks as always to the superb TablePress plugin. Admittedly, this makes for a smaller subset of the whole (just under a quarter) than it is for the NZ competition (more like half), but the next sensible breakpoint would be 5+ entries and that would result in a two-hundred-row table, here. If you’re super curious, here’s a full version you can tinker with; let me know if you unearth anything good.
4. Here they are leading the craft beer coverage, grouped with two breweries who fared much better in the wider drinks industry reporting, and (more understandably) the only one mentioned in their local paper.
5. Those are technically judged on the exact scores, not the medals, but 1) we don’t get told those, and 2) the Champion is almost always going to be the one with the most golds, barring unlikely edge cases.
6. There’s extra circumstantial evidence in that these beers are entered only in keg, and almost always given pretty generic style-based names.
7. Melbourne Royal’s 2024 AIBA Entry Booklet, p6.
8. And I might have to finish off a long-neglected post about the mere idea of this award and its terrible name (hence the scarequotes) another time.
9. In NZ, Behemoth have recently won titles in the Medium tier with an MPC in the 60s; Three Sisters won the Small tier in 2022 with an MPC of just 37. Both are regularly among the biggest contributors of entries.
10. Indeed, maybe even a little misty-eyed mourning, since they were in the process of closing down as these awards were announced.
11. Assuming (reasonably, I think) that Bodriggy are in the “Medium” tier. If they’ve already grown into “Large” they’d be nipping at Hawkers’ heels, but both are still swamped by Brick Lane’s haul.
12. F-something breweries are to 2024 Australia as Something-dog breweries were to 2015 New Zealand.
13. Neither of the two NT breweries who entered won a gold medal, which is part of the criteria for a Championship (p14).
14. Some of the breweries discussed above who skipped the AIBAs don’t enter these either — and even for those that do we only get a list of medal-winning beers, making this kind of analysis impossible anyway.
15. I used the IBA own members list and a handy piece on The Crafty Pint to help attribute ownership, here.
16. The only other time I dipped my toe in the ocean of AIBAs results was a close look at their changing fortunes over the last few years, so I was curious to check in.
17. Endeavour: 31 entries for 29 MPC and 0.34 PPE, Coles: 18 entries for 33 MPC and 0.39 PPE — and zero golds for either of them.
18. See for example this piece in a trade focused publication. Interestingly, Tinnies used to get a bit of attention for doing well at awards (see here and here), so something’s caused a dramatic reversal.
19. In short, it’s obvious that (a lot of) people care who makes their beer; the simple fact that companies fudge the truth is proof. If openly Dan-Murphy’s-branded product would sell just as well, Endeavour would save themselves the bother of inventing a dozen phantom breweries.
20. I did my best to check with the old Brews News Australian Brewery Database, and will also note that a few former contract brands (like Philter, which won the “Gypsy” title in 2018) have built their own facilities.