The first fun fact I noticed about the recent Australian International Beer Awards was that the two headline Champion Beers were both dead straight lagers: the dark lager from Western Australia’s unassuming Wedgetail Brewing, and the flashy and award-laden American version of Trumer Pils¹ — opposites, in some ways, but united in being untrendy simplicity that stood out among a crowd of thousands. For the rest, I needed a few days with a messy dataset and a massive spreadsheet…

The AIBAs publish a full list of every beer judged,² so to give two different ways to compare how they performed, I’ve worked out each entrant’s medal percentage and their points per entry — MPC simply asks how many of their beers won a medal (whatever its rank) and PPE adds up a weighted score for each (3 for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze) and divides by their total submitted; higher is better in both cases. In 2025, 79.1% of beers earned a medal, and about half of all entrants had a PPE of 1.30 or more — both fairly solid increases over last year.

The table below includes details for all the breweries who won a trophy or entered at least 10 beers — and so avoids the noisier end of the data, though I’ll highlight some others as we go. [Annoyingly, a bug somewhere in my blog software has broken the sorting function.³ But everything’s also available as a Google Sheet, if you’d like to explore the data more yourself.]

Performance at the 2025 AIBAs by breweries who entered 10 or more beers (or won a trophy with less)

N = number of entries, T = trophies, G/S/B = medals, MPC = medal percentage, PPE = points per entry, 🏆 = Champion brewery, 🍺 = brewer of Champion beer, all entrants Australian unless noted

Brewery	n	T	G	S	B	MPC	PPE
Brick Lane	19	0	9	6	4	100	2.26
Philter (🏆 Medium Aust.)	22	2	8	6	6	90.9	1.91
Slipstream (🏆 Small Aust.)	26	1	6	16	4	100	2.08
Mountain Goat	23	0	6	11	5	95.7	1.96
Hawkers (🏆 Large Aust.)	16	0	6	6	2	87.5	2.00
Felons	12	0	5	4	3	100	2.17
Garage Project (NZ)	12	0	5	4	3	100	2.17
Stone & Wood	14	0	5	4	3	85.7	1.86
Altitude (NZ) (🏆 Small Int'l.)	26	1	4	14	6	92.3	1.77
Reckless	26	1	4	9	10	88.5	1.54
Bodriggy	18	0	4	8	4	88.9	1.78
Urban Alley	10	0	4	5	1	100	2.30
Cypher	12	0	4	4	3	91.7	1.92
Cheeky Monkey	12	0	4	4	2	83.3	1.83
Stomping Ground (🏆 Victorian)	14	1	4	3	7	100	1.79
Bridge Road	25	1	3	11	6	80	1.48
Balter	17	0	3	8	5	94.1	1.76
4 Pines	22	0	3	7	9	86.4	1.45
Beerfarm	15	0	3	7	3	86.7	1.73
King Road	11	2	3	6	2	100	2.09
Blackman's	16	0	3	5	5	81.25	1.50
Nail	16	0	3	5	4	75	1.44
TWØBAYS	10	0	3	5	2	100	2.10
Margaret River Beer Co.	17	0	3	4	10	100	1.59
Boundary Island	13	1	3	4	6	100	1.77
BentSpoke	16	0	2	8	6	100	1.75
Rocky Ridge	15	0	2	8	5	100	1.80
Moffat Beach	12	0	2	7	3	100	1.92
Eddyline Brewery (NZ)	15	0	2	7	3	80	1.53
Asahi Yatala	12	0	2	6	2	83.3	1.67
King River Brewing Co	19	0	2	5	9	84.2	1.32
Weihenstephan (Ger.) (🏆 Large Int'l.)	9	0	2	5	1	88.9	1.89
Kaiju!	10	1	2	4	3	90	1.70
Hawkesbury Brewing Co	11	0	2	4	1	63.6	1.36
Bright Brewery	12	0	2	3	2	58.3	1.17
Thorny Devil	14	0	2	2	7	78.6	1.21
Merino	6	2	2	2	2	100	2.00
Diatribe (USA) (🏆 New Exhibitor)	3	0	2	1	0	100	2.67
Dollar Bill (🏆 "Gypsy" brewer)	3	1	2	0	1	100	2.33
CBCo	15	0	1	8	3	80	1.47
Jetty Road	13	0	1	6	5	92.3	1.54
Village Days	12	0	1	6	4	91.7	1.58
Hong Kong Beer (China)	18	0	1	6	4	61.1	1.06
Pirate Life Brewing	10	0	1	4	4	90	1.50
Green Beacon	11	0	1	3	4	72.7	1.18
49th State (USA) (🏆 Medium Int'l.)	4	0	1	2	0	75	1.75
Sydney Brewery	13	0	1	1	7	69.2	0.92
Mahou (Spain)	13	0	1	1	3	38.5	0.62
CUB Cascade	4	1	1	1	2	100	1.75
Rojicat	4	1	1	1	1	75	1.50
Endeavour / Pinnacle Drinks	15	0	1	0	5	40	0.53
Trumer (USA) (🍺 International)	5	1	1	0	4	100	1.40
Wedgetail (🍺 Australian)	2	1	1	0	1	100	2.00
Coopers	23	0	0	10	8	78.3	1.22
CUB Abbotsford	14	0	0	8	6	100	1.57
Shelter	10	0	0	7	1	80	1.50
Three Sisters (NZ)	23	0	0	6	10	69.6	0.96
Gage Roads	13	0	0	5	7	92.3	1.31
Wolf of the Willows	10	0	0	4	6	100	1.40
Brothers Beer (NZ)	10	0	0	4	5	90	1.30
NBeer (China)	10	0	0	4	3	70	1.10
Boston Brewing Company	11	0	0	3	6	81.8	1.09
Limestone Coast Brewing Operations	11	0	0	3	6	81.8	1.09
Bucketty's	10	0	0	2	4	60	0.80
No-Li Brewhouse (USA)	10	0	0	0	4	40	0.40

Unusually-level local champions, and what a medal means

I’ve sorted the table by gold medals won, which helpfully shows all three Australian winners of the production-based Champion Brewery tiers grouped tightly together.⁴ The smallest, Brisbane’s Slipstream, was arguably the most impressive of the trio with 100 MPC and fractionally the higher PPE but they were all close in a way that the headline-sharing Champions of these things aren’t always.

This year, the most-obvious question that leaps off the table is: why weren’t Brick Lane or Mountain Goat (the 2024 and 2023 winners in the Large tier, respectively) crowned instead of (2022 Champion) Hawkers? And that comes down to a little quirk that has always been in the background but never presented so clearly before now. These titles are awarded on the basis of the scores (not medal types) of a brewery’s best four entries.⁵ So a gold could be anywhere from 17 to a perfect 20 out of 20 points and Hawkers’ best four golds must’ve added up to more than those who landed higher on my table.

Indeed, it’s interesting (I think) that there’s room in the math of it all for the results to get even weirder and less intuitive. It’s possible for a brewery with four golds to be beaten by another with just one, plus two high-scoring silvers and a bronze. In New Zealand, the Brewers Guild has ditched this system in favour of a medal count for their upcoming awards.⁶ But all rankings will have their weird edge cases; event organisers should just do more to explain things — listing the actual point totals of the Championship contenders at the AIBAs would be easy and effective.

Especially as overall MPC creeps higher (as it has in NZ as well), it’s important that people understand that medals here are less like what you’d win at the Olympics, and more like grades awarded at university.⁷ Breweries are getting more discerning about what they submit — which has the added benefit of costing them less in fees ($200-$325 per beer) — and other metrics, like my PPE, can help make comparisons in an era where dozens of companies earn medals for everything they enter.

Upheaval in the international order

Internationally, this year’s results broke a two-year run of NZ dominance in all three tiers. The only Championship awarded to my home country went to Altitude, who took the Small title from Three Sisters — previous repeat winners who stood out this year as an example of the “throw everything, see what sticks” strategy that originally inspired me to do this kind of analysis; their MPC and PPE both falling below the competition average as they sent more beer than all but a handful of other breweries. Altitude themselves were first-equal on that score, to much greater effect.

The Medium size tier was only sparsely contested by overseas entrants, allowing Alaskan brewery 49th State to take the title with a fairly modest performance (Behemoth, the 2023 & 2024 winner, did not compete). Meanwhile, Germany’s Weihenstephaner reclaimed the Championship they held in 2021 & 2022 from NZ’s Garage Project, who had won it in both intervening years. Here, GP had 3 more golds than their rival, but another rule kicked in: beers brewed under contract don’t count and that prevented some high-scoring entries from adding to their “best four” — just as it had done back home, last year, when Parrotdog took the title.

In the context of something like a 10% decline in beers submitted to the AIBAs,⁸ a very slightly higher proportion came from overseas this year, with the figure inching closer to a third — mostly from NZ (132), the USA (133), and China (214). One company, BeerFortune, stood out as 2025’s single-largest contributor of entries, with 65 consolidated from 20 Chinese breweries — with results pretty much in line with the competition average.⁹ $20K or so in fees (plus stock, shipping, and time) sounds like a lot, but might be a good investment and something for other trade groups to consider with awards around the world.

Passed-over performances and preconception pushback

Another reason I run this analysis is to find the underappreciated performances that don’t get the attention they deserve, usually because they don’t result in an actual trophy. If I had to pick one, this year it’d be Urban Alley — 100 MPC for two years in a row, and improving their PPE from 2024’s 2.11 to 2.30, the highest of any brewery entering 10 or more beers, while their ‘Slapshot’ Draught joined the ranks of Consistency Of Excellence medal winners.¹⁰ Brick Lane’s result was only fractionally lower off nearly twice as many entries, and look at Felons posting a score literally identical to Garage Project’s. All three breweries turned in a range of beers wider than you might assume, and I think it’s fair to say their high marks would surprise a few folks liable to write them off as safe, commodity brewers.

While Black Hops only entered 6 beers and so aren’t in my table, their stunning result of 3 golds and 3 silvers — so 100 MPC and 2.50 PPE — is worth celebrating, and a nice break from them being in the news for all the wrong reasons.¹¹ And Shining Peak — winner in the Small tier at the New Zealand awards last year — sent in just five beers, all bottled stouts and sours, and won gold or silver with each of them (plus the Barrel Aged beer trophy) for an even higher 2.60 PPE.

Keg v Bottle & Can (2025)

Because of the persistent belief — I don’t want to say “myth” yet — that kegged beers (and therefore large and/or wealthy breweries) are at a systematic advantage, I re-ran the experiment I piloted with 2024’s data on this year’s results. And again, beer in kegs did generally fare a little better than packaged product.

	All	Keg	Can	Bott.
Medal percentage	79.1	83.7	77.1	72.6
Points per entry	1.38	1.53	1.28	1.29

But when you isolate the beers that were entered in both formats and see how they compare ‘against themselves’ the margins were even tighter than last year. The table below summarises all 239 instances of a beer being judged twice and charts any “keg advantage” in their results. “=” means the beer scored the same in both formats (whatever it scored), while “+2” represents the keg stock’s result landing two ranks better than the pack (gold over bronze, or silver over no medal). The overall keg advantage was just +0.06 this year; less than a tenth of a medal position.

	-3	-2	-1	=	1	2	3
	0	12	55	98	56	16	2

A tiny majority of trophies (12 out of 21) went to kegged beer, but interestingly both IPA categories — where the risks of packaging might be especially relevant — were won by canned beer (from Boundary Island and Philter) and each of them were also entered in kegs but only won a silver in that format. And a green-bottle lager travelled 12,000km to win Champion International Beer, so anything can happen.

The Department of Redundant Awards Department

Two new headline Championships were added to the already-busy lineup this year: Indie Beer and Indie Brewer. Late last year, the Independent Brewers Association announced they wouldn’t be running their own conference or awards in 2025, citing sponsorship troubles and declining entries — and the slight downturn in AIBAs submissions seems to suggest that energy wasn’t redirected by many (if any) breweries. As some kind of consolation, the IBA sponsored these new titles. But they seem extremely redundant. “Independent”¹² brewers already dominate the AIBAs as both entrants and winners, accounting for something like 85% of Australian beer judged and winning all but one of the style-category trophies. Given the overlapping criteria with other Championships, Wedgetail’s win was a foregone conclusion and Philter’s was a one-in-three chance.

	n	T	G	S	B	MPC	PPE
Coles (Tinnies, Lorry Boys...)	6	0	0	1	4	83.3	1.00
Endeavour (Zytho, Colossal...)	15	0	1	0	5	40	0.53
Coopers	23	0	0	10	8	78.3	1.22
Lion / Kirin	31	0	5	9	11	80.6	1.42
C.U.B. / Asahi	122	1	18	50	42	90.2	1.61
"Independent"	1269	15	180	448	415	82.2	1.46
(Non-indie combined)	(199)	(1)	(24)	(70)	(72)	(83.4)	(1.43)

Champion Victorian Brewery has always felt a little unnecessary, as a separate title, even though its existence is understandable given the awards are based in the state. In the previous four years (since its inception in 2021) it went to a brewery who also took out one of the main size-based Australian Champion titles. But this year broke that trend, presumably because Stomping Ground’s “best four” scored higher than their fellow Victorians at Hawkers, but not high enough to beat Philter (from New South Wales), who are likely in the same production tier.

The truly superfluous award, in my opinion, is the “Gypsy Brewer” one — which I can never bring myself to type without scarequotes since the term is so outmoded. Dollar Bill won it, as they have four years running and now half of all the times it’s ever been awarded. Their main “competition” comes from beers commissioned by Coles and Endeavour, which are reliably among the worst-performing in the entire set. The hosts on awards night were openly riffing on how predictable a category this has become. It’s time to retire it: the name is terrible, the business model isn’t as relevant a part of the industry as it was a decade ago, and Dollar Bill’s own barrel-ageing / blendery operation isn’t really a great fit for the original concept anyway. But that might all be a post of its own for another time.

And… that’s enough for now. As I said last year, if you’ve made it this far and found some or all of this interesting and/or entertaining, chances are good that you know someone else who might too. The internet is fairly broken, these days, so please send it wherever you think it might be welcome.

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1. Living in the U.S. at the moment, I hoped I’d be able to find the latter for the somewhat-traditional banner photo my awards analysis posts get. But it’s made on the other coast and not readily available. A small WA brewery is even less so, obviously, so I’ve got its namesake up there instead.
2. This year, the competition expanded to include ciders, but I’ve left them out of my analysis. Those, plus the design and media categories, will mean my totals don’t match others you might see reported. I’m just focusing on the beers.
3. I use TablePress, which is generally excellent. Best I can tell, WordPress is mangling its code in the name of ‘efficiency’ but solving it is beyond me for now and I wanted to publish this rather than tinker with that.
4. Neat trick: you can search by the 🏆 emoji to see all nine local and international headline winners as a group.
5. 2025 AIBAs Entry Booklet, p15
6. 2025 NZBAs Entry Guide, p10 — though, for what it’s worth, those tie-breaking rules are seriously underdetermined and I’m curious to see how things shake out.
7. Of course, it complicates things that some beer competitions — like the World Beer Cup — actually do just award one medal of each rank in each style.
8. The figures are a little slippery to compare without being careful: there are design and media categories, and ciders were added in 2025.
9. Australian-based distributors can also enter foreign-brewed beers, which leads to some real mess in the regional data given the way Melbourne Royal report it all out. If you go for your own dive in my data and find a weird geographical designation for someone, that might be why.
10. This is the (brilliant, I think) special mention for beers which have won a gold medal three years in a row. It’s rare; the current set is only 8.
11. If you don’t know, I honestly envy you. Their ousted co-founder has been on a ridiculous self-indulgent meltdown and press tour lately — and most people would remember their name from a shockingly poor piece of marketing years ago (under his watch). Here’s to moving on and doing better, I guess.
12. I have my issues with that word as it is deployed in Australia lately, but we’ll set those aside a moment.