With 280 judges and more than 9,000 beers, this year’s World Beer Cup, which concluded at a Las Vegas ceremony April 24, was a fierce competition. When the suds subsided, several Bay Area breweries, including 21st Amendment and Faction Brewing, brought home glory.
This year’s field was packed with competitors, with 2,060 breweries from 50 countries entering a staggering 9,300 beers in 110 competition categories. It took the other judges and me a week to sift through them all and award 329 gold, silver and bronze medals.
United States breweries brought home 262 — 80 percent — of the medals from the competition. In second place, Canada brought home 17, while Germany took home a dozen. With 61 medals, California won the lion’s share of U.S. medals.
It’s not news that California’s known for hop-forward beers such as IPAs and pale ales, but this year’s results confirmed it. In the American-style IPA and West Coast-style IPA, two of the most highly competitive categories, four of the six medals were won by California breweries — San Juan Capistrano’s Docent Brewing, Long Beach’s ISM Brewing, Orange’s Green Cheek Beer Co. and San Diego’s Abnormal Beer Co.
Juicy or hazy IPAs had the most entries — 326 — as it did last year and for several years before that. The West-Coast-style IPA category had 281 entries and German-style pilsner had 221. Hops are still king, but lagers are making a play to cut into their dominance.
The Bay Area’s biggest winner was Alvarado Street Brewery, which won three awards. The brewery’s original Monterey outpost won a bronze for its Mai Tai P.A. in the American-style strong pale ale category, while the Salinas brewery won a silver for its Howzit Punch (American-style sour ale) and a bronze for Single Cone (American-style IPA).
San Francisco and San Leandro’s 21st Amendment Brewery brought home a gold medal for its Amendment Lager in the American-style cream ale category. Faction Brewing co-founders Rodger Davis and Claudia Pamparana were on hand to pick up a gold medal for their Alameda Brewery’s Faction 586, a popular international pale ale. And Rohnert Park-based Old Caz Beer won a gold medal for Chismosa in the American-style amber lager category.
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San Francisco’s Barebottle Brewing, which has four locations in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, won a silver medal for its Small Wonder Dust in the juicy/hazy pale ale division.
Bay Area-based bronze medalists included San Francisco’s Bartlett Hall, which won for its Painted Devil in the Belgian-style strong blonde ale category. Berkeley’s Fieldwork Brewing, with nine locations in California, won a bronze for its Belgian-style tripel, Adrianne. And Oakland’s Ghost Town Brewing picked up a bronze for Nose Goblin in the imperial India pale ale category.
Find all the World Beer Cup results at www.worldbeercup.org.
Contact Jay R. Brooks at BrooksOnBeer@gmail.com.
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