It is very much Awards Season: I was recently at the World Beer Cup, the Australian International Beer Awards crowned new champions last week, and entries are now open for the 2026 New Zealand Beer Awards. But I still owe you all my traditional analysis of the 2025 data.¹ Post-match attention largely focused on the spectacular run by Brave Brewing² — and I think the numbers actually reveal a few more reasons to be impressed with them — but there’s always a lot of weird little wrinkles to shine a light on, and try to learn from. Plus, it’s good context for this year’s competition.

The Brewers Guild provide a list of every beer entered into their awards — unlike most competitions, which only publish the winners — so (as I’ve done since 2017) I’ve worked out two measures of each brewery’s performance: medal percentage (MPC), simply what fraction of their beers earned any kind of medal; and points per entry (PPE), a weighted score which adds 3 for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze, and divides by their total entries. 2025’s competition-wide MPC was 80.3% and the median PPE was 1.25. The table below shows the full standings, sorted by PPE.³

Performance at the 2025 New Zealand Beer Awards

N = no. of entries, MPC = medal percentage, PPE = points per entry, T = style trophies, G/S/B = medals, 🍺 = brewer of Champion beer, 🏆 = Championship winner — all breweries are from NZ unless noted

Brewery	n	MPC	PPE	T	G	S	B
Brave (🏆 Small & "Overall")	17	100	2.18	3	8	4	5
Garage Project (🍺 & 🏆 Large)	27	100	2.15	2	10	11	6
Karamu Barrelworks (🏆 Micro)	7	100	2.00	0	1	5	1
Volstead	2	100	2.00	0	0	2	0
8 Wired	5	80	2.00	1	2	2	0
Beer Baroness	10	100	1.90	1	2	5	3
Abandoned	8	100	1.88	0	2	3	3
Shining Peak	19	100	1.84	1	4	8	7
Ghost Brewing	5	100	1.80	0	1	2	2
Sunshine	10	90	1.80	0	3	3	3
Heyday	9	100	1.78	0	1	5	3
Brew Moon	8	100	1.75	1	2	2	4
Altitude (🏆 Medium)	21	90.5	1.71	2	5	7	7
Hop Federation	13	84.6	1.69	0	4	3	4
Three Boys	13	76.9	1.69	0	4	4	2
Good George	12	91.7	1.67	0	2	5	4
McLeod’s	14	92.9	1.64	0	2	6	5
Mount	10	90	1.60	0	0	7	2
Lion	18	83.3	1.56	0	2	9	4
Behemoth	32	84.4	1.53	0	4	14	9
Lakeman	19	84.2	1.53	0	4	5	7
Parrotdog	19	84.2	1.53	0	3	7	6
Wilderness	4	100	1.50	0	1	0	3
Fork & Brewer	8	100	1.50	0	0	4	4
Canyon	8	87.5	1.50	1	1	3	3
Emerson's	24	79.2	1.46	1	4	8	7
Liberty	11	72.7	1.45	0	3	2	3
The Island	5	100	1.40	0	1	0	4
DB (incl. Tuatara, etc.)	22	90.9	1.36	0	2	6	12
Panhead	22	90.9	1.36	0	0	10	10
Renaissance	3	100	1.33	0	0	1	2
Mountain Goat (Aust.)	6	83.3	1.33	0	0	3	2
Sawmill	11	81.8	1.27	1	1	3	5
Martinborough	8	87.5	1.25	0	0	3	4
Isthmus	4	75	1.25	0	0	2	1
Eruption	9	77.8	1.22	0	0	4	3
Glenorchy	5	80	1.20	0	0	2	2
Black Sands	6	83.3	1.17	0	0	2	3
Bach	6	66.7	1.17	1	1	1	2
Duncan’s	8	62.5	1.13	0	1	2	2
Alibi	9	66.7	1.11	0	1	2	3
Urbanaut	10	80	1.10	0	0	3	5
Emporium	1	100	1.00	0	0	0	1
Mad Whale	1	100	1.00	0	0	0	1
The Laboratory	5	80	1.00	0	0	1	3
Brew Union	4	75	1.00	0	0	1	2
Twofold	4	75	1.00	0	0	1	2
b.effect	7	71.4	1.00	0	0	2	3
ChinChiller	7	71.4	1.00	0	0	2	3
Choice Bros.	7	71.4	1.00	0	0	2	3
Asahi (incl. some Aust.)	12	66.7	1.00	0	0	4	4
Colab	5	60	1.00	0	0	2	1
Bridge Road (Aust.)	2	50	1.00	0	0	1	0
Brood	2	50	1.00	0	0	1	0
Sprig + Fern	16	56.3	0.94	0	1	4	4
Rhyme & Reason	7	57.1	0.86	0	0	2	2
Rudi’s	5	40	0.80	0	1	0	1
Wigram	7	57.1	0.71	0	0	1	3
Two Thumb	12	33.3	0.67	0	0	4	0
The Cargo Collective	4	50	0.50	0	0	0	2
North End	2	50	0.50	0	0	0	1
Roosters	2	50	0.50	0	0	0	1
Thief	2	50	0.50	0	0	0	1
DNA	5	40	0.40	0	0	0	2
Rudd House	3	33.3	0.33	0	0	0	1
Shortjaw	5	20	0.20	0	0	0	1
Moa	7	14.3	0.14	0	0	0	1
Gadoochi	4	0	0.00	0	0	0	0

Definitely not just chance and luck; jury still out on magic

The beer at the top of this post is Garage Project’s ‘Chance, Luck & Magic’ which won Champion New Zealand Beer, the sort of ‘Best In Show’ title awarded after a final taste-off among the trophy winners from each style category. In November, it also won a bronze medal at the Brussels Beer Challenge, and then a silver at the World Beer Cup this April — and I already had a photo of it because a different vintage won top honours at the NZBAs back in 2022. It’s a nice reminder of how key the Wild Workshop is to GP’s success in competitions; it probably accounted for about half of the company’s medals in this round, and both of their style-category trophies.

Indeed, the only question about a 2021 vintage winning in 2025 is whether they’d rationed enough stock to keep entering it in competitions and maintain its status as “commercially available”⁴ — but I did notice occasional events showcasing it and its labelmates. So it’s rare, sure, but so is everything from Karamu, the Champion Micro Brewery. You evidently have good grounds to grab anything you see from either.

/bɹæɪv/ (adjective) — making a fine show or display

The 2025 competition really did belong to Brave, though. On their way to claiming the “Overall Champion” title, they won trophies in three different style categories: International Pale Ale, (non-hazy) IPA, and ‘Specialty & Experimental’⁵ — all of which were at the more hotly-contested end of the spectrum in terms of entrants and other gold medal winners. One brewery taking home two trophies in a year is actually surprisingly common, but three is something else — not unique as the Guild claimed,⁶ but very impressive all the same.

The “Overall” title is — confusingly, I think — awarded on a different basis than the other Champion Brewery titles; it’s basically PPE.⁷ Brave were ahead by a decent amount there: more than 10%, well over an order of magnitude bigger than 8 Wired’s 2023 winning margin. And if that award had never been invented and everyone still competed together regardless of size, I think Brave would’ve been Champion NZ Brewery Full Stop, as it were, since some of Garage Project’s gold medal beers were likely made by their contract partner bStudio (themselves Champion Manufacturer of such things) and those aren’t included.⁸

And while they’ve been ahead of the competition-wide MPC and PPE stats every year I’ve run the numbers, their 8 gold medals in 2025 is only one short of what they took home in the previous seven years combined. It really was a stunning achievement.

The other local Champions, and the absent Australians

No one spammed their way to victory in this run of the competition. I’m always on the lookout for that, since beers that don’t medal only count against you in the PPE-based “Overall” category and many have brute-forced a title with surprisingly poor performance, statistically speaking. But Brave and Garage Project set a high bar, Karamu were right up there with them, and Altitude aren’t that far behind despite falling onto page two of my table.

The other interesting thing, Championship-wise, is that one award wasn’t given out: Champion Australian Brewery. After a minor fiasco (if you ask me) with the two “International” entrants in 2023 and then zero in 2024, the category was retooled to be Australia-specific — but despite many NZ breweries entering the awards across the Tasman, only three (and arguably really just two) took up the reciprocal offer.

Bridge Road put in two of their non-alc beers, winning one silver. But you must enter at least four beers in three different classes to qualify.⁹ Asahi Australia met that requirement,¹⁰ but none of theirs won a gold, which is the second condition for Champion status here. Mountain Goat (an Asahi subsidiary) did slightly better than the competition average MPC and PPE with their six beers, but none earned a gold.

The Australian trophy category is open again this year, but it lacks credibility and prestige when only a handful of entrants contest it. If one Mountain Goat beer had earned a few extra points and struck gold, theirs would’ve been a hollow victory.

A miscellany of medalists and many who missed

Outside of the headline-grabbing trophies, there’s always a lot of interesting details; both good and bad. Since I praised their impressive turn in 2024, I should note that Sprig + Fern reverted back to their previously-dismal performance, damn near halving their MPC and PPE. Hopefully they’ve had a hard look at what caused the positive outlier and undone whatever decision undermined it. Publicly, they were crowing about a silver at the ‘World Beer Awards’ — a competition which told me S+F were the only entrant from New Zealand that year, necessitating a rather large asterisk in addition to the awkwardness of going on about “the greatest of all time” winning a WBA silver and an NZBA bronze.

Two Thumb also really struggled, putting in a dozen beers and having two thirds of them fail to medal. Behemoth look to have been operating in spam mode again, once more submitting the most beers in the competition to land 4th by medals (so likely narrowly missing out on the Medium-tier Championship) but 20th by PPE and 27th by MPC. On the flip side, Beer Baroness, Brew Moon, Heyday and Abandoned all deserved more fanfare for their performances — the former two did take one style-category trophy home each, but those are also easily overshadowed on the day.

North End make for an interesting case, too: they’ve gone from putting forward 5 to 10 beers and doing very well in previous years to earning only one bronze from two entries. Personnel must’ve be a key factor, there; their former brewer was also an experienced judge — and knowing which beers to enter in what category is basically as important as brewing them well in the first place.¹¹

How many medals is too many..? How few beers is too few..?

Overall MPC continues its steady climb, up about four points to 80% and so way up on the 52% we first saw in 2017 — even as total entries equally reliably goes the other way, now at 625 from 695 in 2024 and trending down from a high of 955 in 2019. 16 breweries scored 100 MPC this round, and 7 more were in the 90s. Golds are still rare enough (about 13% overall) and the Guild has tie-breaking rules ready,¹² so MPC creep isn’t really a problem — but I think it vindicates keeping an eye on PPE.

Looking more closely at the contestation of different styles, you have to wonder if it’s time for another reshuffle when some categories have several times more entries than others. The Guild provides a version of the table below,¹³ but I’ve added how many breweries submitted for each, plus MPC and ‘GPC’ to show that some classes have wildly different gold medal frequencies. Look how poorly on-trend hazies and low-alc beers fared, for example — though it’d take a lot more work to figure out if that’s harsher judging of ‘novel’ varieties, or a bandwagon effect lowering quality.

Category	Brewers	Beers	MPC	G	GPC
Amber/Dark Lager & Ale	21	28	67.9	5	17.9
British & European Ale	24	37	86.5	5	13.5
Fruit & Flavoured	25	42	83.3	5	11.9
International Lager	33	58	70.7	3	5.2
International Pale Ale	38	61	77	6	9.8
India Pale Ale	29	46	91.3	9	19.6
Juicy/Hazy IPA	24	34	76.5	2	5.9
Juicy/Hazy Pale Ale	32	57	82.5	3	5.3
No, Low & Reduced Alc.	22	34	70.6	2	5.9
NZ IPA, Pale Ale & Draught	31	44	79.5	7	15.9
NZ Lager & Pils	35	61	82	14	23
Specialty & Experimental	26	47	83	10	21.3
Stout & Porter	33	46	84.8	8	17.4
Wheat & Other Grain	12	12	83.3	1	8.3
Wood & Barrel Aged	10	18	88.9	4	22.2
Grand Total	68	625	80.3	84	13.4

An unsustainable award, and its nebulous new replacements

Finally, turning to 2025’s anciliary awards, Sawmill won in the Brewing Sustainability category — as they had done every year since it was introduced in 2019.¹⁴ It was always unclear whether this award was intended to recognise efforts undertaken in the relevant year or if everything a brewery had ever done, cumulatively, could count each time. I asked Sawmill and they said they’d “love to give [me] more information…” but they never did.¹⁵ Back when we had a Beer Media award (2012-2022, rip), it was strictly for work published in the past calendar year — and even then, there was a practice where the winner would sit on the judging panel in the following year, absenting themselves.

So if Sawmill didn’t have the decency step aside, the Guild should’ve adjusted their criteria to enable and encourage some turnover and highlight other good work going on. Instead, I noticed that the rules for 2025 were changed to make fully half of a submission’s points dependent on the project’s ‘cost savings or improved returns.’¹⁶ This brought in brute economic language that was previously absent and gave the whole thing an unfortunate ‘green-washing’ feel.¹⁷ No one ever demanded that the Champion Barrel-Aged beer be “economically viable” — we just wanted it to be good. A brewery should still be applauded for something that costs them real money but secures a tangible environmental benefit or avoids a serious harm.

Anyway, that category is now gone. So is the Beer Tourism one, and the old Morton Coutts Trophy for Innovation. The Industry Awards are now Packaging (as in design, which has been around since 2021), Community, People, and Future. The three new ones are fleshed out with a paragraph each and then a page with more guidance and the judging criteria (see p23-28 of the 2026 Entry Guide), and you can see how previous trophy concepts can be re-homed in one or another, with room to spare.

But they’re all still a little vague — and maybe that’s an opportunity. Anyone can nominate for them, so with a little paperwork (and $60, an unfortunate barrier, but maybe a necessary one in the age of sloptext generators) you and me and the rest of us can help shape these various new hats by choosing what names we throw in them.

Submissions are open until 10 June. So go ponder that while I turn my attention to the recent AIBAs in Melbourne, and then work on a different kind of debrief from the World Beer Cup in Philadelphia.

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1. I’m living in Washington D.C. at the moment and while the distance isn’t enough to disconnect me from the beer business / subculture back home, it is (to say the least) a strange and distracting time to try and sit still with a large spreadsheet. I’m also keen to write up the WBC and the AIBAs and some part of my brain insists on being chronological even if it’s chronically late. AIBAs data entry and number-crunching is basically done; WBC is… basically impossible — but we’ll get to that.
2. RNZ’s headline was ‘One Brewer Smashes This Year’s Beer Awards’ and their local paper proudly fleshed out out that report with some extra quotes. They also led industry-specific coverage, understandably.
3. Annoyingly, there’s a bug in my WordPress install somewhere that is preventing you the reader from sorting that table yourself — the TablePress plugin remains excellent and is not to blame. I’ve made everything available here as a Google Sheet as well, if you want to play around with the data.
4. Entry Guide, p15.
5. This is a weird kitchen-sink category of taxonomic orphans from American barleywine to gluten free beer by way of Brett-fermented and fresh-hopped things. It’s frankly a mess. Brave’s winner here was True Blue, a West-Coast Pilsner. That substyle, at least, has been relocated into the International Lager bucket for 2026.
6. e.g., here, on Facebook: “a feat not seen in 18 years!” Naturally, I checked. In 2018, Lion won 3 (and Champion Large NZ Brewery, the first year of the brewery-size divisions); in 2016, Tuatara also won 3 (and Champion NZ Brewery); D.B. won 4 in 2010; and Emerson’s won 3 in 2009 (as well as Champion NZ Brewery), although one of theirs was in the “Festive Brew” category which was possibly kind-of different?
7. With a few caveats, see p8 of the Entry Guide. As evidence of the potential for confusion, note that the RNZ and Hawke’s Bay Today pieces I linked in note 2 omit the word and (incorrectly) say they were named “champion brewery”.
8. Entry Guide, p 10. Sadly, we don’t get any data on this, to know what counts and what doesn’t.
9. Entry Guide, p9.
10. At least, I think so — I had to do my best to tease apart their entries from the conglomerate’s NZ-based brands; both were simply “Asahi Beverages” in the results booklet. For what it’s worth, the Australian wing’s stats (75 MPC, 1.25 PPE) were considerably stronger than their NZ colleagues (62.5 MPC, 0.86 PPE), but neither are great.
11. Although, that said, at least two sitting NZBA judges are the figureheads of breweries that fared surprisingly badly: Tracey Banner is from Sprig + Fern and David Nicholls set up DNA after leaving Moa.
12. Entry Guide, p 10. The updated rules for Championships (the regular ones, not the “Overall” category) now count golds, then silvers, then trophies if the contenders are still tied — and if they’re tied on trophies as well, I guess they’re officially tied, and I don’t think it’s an unreasonable way to end it. It’s a huge improvement on the old, opaque, points-based system.
13. Results Catalogue, p6.
14. They also won the Packaging award, and a trophy for their hefeweizen, which was that solitary gold medal in the Wheat & Other Grain row on the table above. So that’s another “three trophies” feat — but in very different fields.
15. It happens.
16. Entry Guide, p27.
17. If you listen to the episode of The Third Pint Theory with the Sawmill founders, it’s actually kind of shocking how bottom-line-first their approach is; it’s the sustainability of the company driving decisions that are praised in more ‘environmental’ terms.