Article: American Beer success at 2010 AIBA

My latest article for Suite101 is here http://beers.suite101.com/article.cfm/american-beers-succeed-in-australian-international-beer-awards.

The article is targeted more at the American reader, who may or may not be aware of their countrymen's craft brewing success outside of the US.

For Australian readers, it's more just for interest's sake, as so many of the American medal-winning beers are not exported to Australia. I think only Rogue Ales & Great Divide beers are available, and then only from premium beer outlets such as Slowbeer, Purvis, International Beer Shop, and Platinum Cellars.

Oh, there is of course Samuel Adams Boston Lager. It won a Bronze in the European Lager (Packaged) category. But The Boston Beer Company won 30 medals, from 36 beers submitted. You would think that they could perhaps see their way to exporting some of these others ?

2010 Australian International Beer Awards - Analysis of medals

I've gone through the results of the 2010 AIBA, and totalled up the number of medals per category. I don't have visibility of the volume of beers submitted per category, and as such can't determine whether a category is strong or weak in an overall sense.

But other inferences can be made from the data by looking at the mix of medals:

Imperials are best, Porter is next

Strongest performing beer style is Imperial Stout.  Winning 21 medals overall, 33% of these were gold. The overall percentage of gold medals for the competition was 10%. (i.e. 10% of medals awarded were gold).

Second strongest style was Porter. Winning 35 medals overall, 23% of these were gold.

Pilsener: must-do-better
The most medals overall was Pilsener, with 47.  However, only 4% were gold.  So it can be inferred that this style is OK, but not reaching its potential.

"Other" is too big a catch-all
The 2nd and 3rd most medals were wone by "Other" categories. This implies two things: there is a lot of good work happening with brewers trying new things, new styles etc. But..... it also implies the categories for this beer show need to be overhauled.  "Other" should not be so prominent in the volume of medals won.

Aussies need some work
Australian-style Lagers and Ales are the underachievers of this show. Although not a widespread style, they only received 1 gold each (JS Sundown Lager and Nail Ale), which accounted for 5% of medals won in this category.

Packaged & Draught categories - unnecessary
One more consideration that comes from the data..... is there really a need to have separate categories for Packaged and Draught beers ? The ratio of medals won is roughly 2:1 (although this will be due to the sheer volume of packaged international beers). It should be noted that the Gold % was roughly the same for both groups (10%).

I wonder if the judges look for "draught" characteristics vs "bottle" characterstics (as they would when judging, say, porter chartacteristics vs pilsener characteristics) ?  I wouldn't think so.  So I think this split in categories should be done away with.

Certainly, they are two different beasts, and should be submitted separately, but then let them be judged against each other.  It wouldn't lessen the number of medals...... but it would remove half the categories.  This might allow the organisers to do something about the "Other" categories and get a little more specific.

Article: 2010 Australian International Beer Awards Trophy Winners

In this article I profile the winning breweries and beers from the 2010 AIBA.

http://beers.suite101.com/article.cfm/2010-australian-international-beer-awards-trophy-winners

Sadly, I have yet try the majority of those discussed. It is not a rule that beers submitted to this competition must also be available in Australia. Although frustrating for beer lovers in Australia, it works to the advantage of Australian brewers (Redoak for example) who have tasted overseas competition success.
 
The full results of the competition can be found here: http://www.beerawards.com/pdfs/AIBA_COR_V2.pdf