Deep dives into the results of beer competitions, and musings on their rules and relevance
The 2024 New Zealand Beer Awards — formerly (and affectionately) known as the BGONZAs — were announced over the weekend, which means it’s time again to dive into the results and seek out whatever curious details lurk under the surface. This year saw a few breweries return to form, some interesting rearrangement among trophy classes, and maybe an uncommon (and underexplained) tie-break at the top.
Continue reading Medals and math VII — returns, reshuffles, and rarely used rules
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.
Continue reading Medals & math: Australian edition — a deep dive into the 2024 AIBAs
So. Beer awards, again. (And belatedly, again.) The announcement that entries were open for the 2024 Brewers Guild of NZ Awards, together with the fact I was at the presentation dinner for the Australian competition last week,1 plus the chance to drink a bunch more New Zealand beer than usual at The Catfish recently have all combined to spur me into finally publishing the number-crunching I did for last year’s BGONZAs. As always, there’s some interesting details in here that are easily overlooked if you don’t do a little elementary statistics, and plenty of trends and quirks to keep in mind while anticipating doing it all over again in August.
Continue reading Medals and math V — close calls, clean sweeps, and other countries
CORRECTION — the original version of this post incorrectly said that ‘Chance, Luck & Magic’ was the overall Champion Beer for the second year running. It wasn’t; Burkes Brewing ‘Unforgiven’ Porter won in 2021. Thanks to Michael Donaldson for noticing and letting me know. The data here is unaffected, but some of my commentary was thereby off.
After this year’s Brewers’ Guild of New Zealand Awards — the BGONZAs, to their friends — the headline result was unusually clear: Garage Project2 just absolutely smashed it. Their ‘Chance, Luck & Magic’ took out the Best In Show award, prompting me to buy a $49 bottle of beer (which was suitably delicious, I should note), and they won the Champion Large Brewery title (for the second year running, no less) in spectacularly unambiguous fashion, since at least two other breweries would need to merge and pool their winnings to come close to G.P.’s medal haul.3 After that, it might seem superfluous to dig in the weeds of the data for other stories lurking in the details, but I have my traditions, and I am undeterred — and I think there’s still some things worthy of a little more attention.
Continue reading Medals and math IV — two in a row seems like it means something…
It’s beer awards night back home in New Zealand. I’ll be tuning in as best I can from over here in Melbourne4 and doubtless obsessing over various weird little details and patterns once I’ve got the full results. As I’ve tried to make the case here before,5 I think there are a few interesting stories lurking underneath the headline results that get most of the attention on the night, and you can only really find them by crunching some numbers. So let’s quickly do that for the awards that have happened since I got distracted by a) moving and b) a pandemic, so we’re all caught up and ready for more — since, as of tomorrow, I’ll have five years worth of data to play with, which feels like it’ll be a good time to go looking for trendlines…6
Last weekend gave us a fresh round of #BGONZAs — the Brewers’ Guild of New Zealand Awards.7 Continuing the new practice they started last year, the Guild has provided us not just with a list of who won what, but a full accounting of who tried to. So, like I did last time, I spent an oddly-enjoyable afternoon spreadsheeting and pivoting and entabulating the results and present them now for a little look behind the curtain at how the newly-expanded list of “Champions” are crowned, and to ponder the many different ways there are in which to succeed, and to fall short. There’s a lot going on — the awards, after all, cover most of the industry — but I think there’s a lot of interesting little details lurking.
Continue reading Medals and math II — the numbers behind this year’s beer awards
The latest round of the Brewers Guild of New Zealand Awards8 were announced this weekend and this year they’ve given us more data than usual to play with. For the first time, the Guild has released information on what was entered, as opposed to just telling us who won, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m the kind of nerd who watches the Olympics and wants a per-capita column on the medal tally. Raw results are one thing, but I’m curious well you did relative to how hard you tried. And now, after an hour or so of strangely-enjoyable data entry and spreadsheeting,9 I know.
Continue reading Medals and math — batting averages at the beer awards