The Australian International Beer Awards is one of the world’s largest competitions of its kind.1 Results of the 2026 competition were announced recently, crowning over a dozen different ‘champions’ of various sizes and classes — including an IPA from Mountain Goat as the Champion Australian Beer, hence the beastie in banner image here2 — and handing out more than two hundred gold medals. A lot of noteworthy detail gets lost in the noise. Luckily, I’ve got a way to contextualise it all.
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.3 Post-match attention largely focused on the spectacular run by Brave Brewing4 — 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 other Wedgetail, with a suitably-high vantage point — original photo by John Tann (2014, CC-BY licensed)
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 Pils5 — 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…
You can tell it’s a nerdy one when it starts with a diagram rather than a photo
I’m going to try and convince you that this an interesting graph. It charts the relative performance, at last year’s Australian International Beer Awards, of all the beers that were entered twice; once in keg, and again packaged. This year’s judging is currently underway in Melbourne, so the process is on my mind, and this is a rare opportunity to test a common belief that breweries more able to sacrifice a whole keg are at an advantage.6 Short answer: only a little, if at all.
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.
A sufficiently big spreadsheet also counts as a “hinterland”
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.
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,7 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.
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.
A cork popped by way of congratulations
After this year’s Brewers’ Guild of New Zealand Awards — the BGONZAs, to their friends — the headline result was unusually clear: Garage Project8 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.9 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.
These were AIBAs, not BGONZAs, admittedly; it turns out I don’t take many awards night photos
It’s beer awards night back home in New Zealand. I’ll be tuning in as best I can from over here in Melbourne10 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,11 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…12
Last weekend gave us a fresh round of #BGONZAs — the Brewers’ Guild of New Zealand Awards.13 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.
