The Medal Record

From national cups judged every season to exhibitions that existed for one summer a century ago. A competition's count here is how many of its medals the archive holds — not how many it has awarded.

and 327 more bodies, held on the brewery records they belong to.

The breweries carrying the most recorded medals. A long cabinet says as much about a brewery entering competitions as about the beer — but every entry below was won, dated and sourced.

• Snake River BrewingUSA52
• Black Tooth Brewing Co.USA46
• Altitude Chophouse & BreweryUSA45
• Super Bock GroupPortugal41
• PraxisPortugal36
• Melvin BrewingUSA30
• Backcountry BrewingCanada29
• South Pacific BreweryPapua New Guinea29
• Blind Tiger Brewery & RestaurantUSA27
• Whitetooth Brewing Co.Canada27
• La Souche MicrobrasserieCanada23
• Phoenix BeveragesMauritius23
• Dog Mountain BrewingCanada22
• Feather Falls Brewing CompanyUSA22
• Blindman BrewingCanada21

Before national beer cups existed, a brewery proved itself at the world's fairs — a gold at the 1889 Paris Exposition or the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition was carried on the label for decades. These are the archive's oldest medals, several belonging to breweries that no longer exist to boast about them.

• 1883Schein-Ploll-Petrina historic breweryGold MedalCooperative Exhibition, Bucharest
• 1883Švyturys BreweryAward / medal — Klaipėdos Porteris / PorterKlaipėda International Business / Trade Fair
• 1884Schein-Ploll-Petrina historic breweryHonors Diploma and Gold MedalExhibition of Agriculture and Industry, Bucharest
• 1887Žalec Brewery / Simon Kukec breweryRecognition / awardRecognition / award
• 1888Žalec Brewery / Simon Kukec breweryRecognition / awardRecognition / award
• 1889Montgomery Brewing Company (pre-Prohibition)Gold Medal — Beer — exact jury class UNKNOWNParis Exposition
• 1893Osaka BreweryHighest award — Beer / official company wording — Asahi Beer (1892 original)World's Columbian Exposition
• 1896I. E. Lipski brewerySilver medal — I. E. Lipski breweryAll-Russia Industrial and Art Exhibition, Nizhny Novgorod
• 1900GubernijaBest beer — Russian PorterSt. Petersburg Exhibition
• 1900I. E. Lipski breweryGold medal — I. E. Lipski breweryExposition Universelle, Paris
• 1900Nippon Beer Jozo / Yebisu BreweryGold prize — BeerParis Exposition
• 1900Olympic BreweryGolden Award — UNKNOWNMilan exhibition
• 1900Osaka BreweryHighest award — Beer / official company wording — Asahi Beer (1892 original)Paris Exposition
• 1900Žalec Brewery / Simon Kukec breweryRecognition from French governmentRecognition from French government
• 1901Šopen / Vilniaus Tauras breweryAward / medal — Šopen breweryRostov-on-Don exhibition
• 1903Helsingborgs historical breweryGold medal — UNKNOWN / brewery exhibitionHelsingborg Industrial and Art Exhibition
• 1904Nippon Beer Jozo / Yebisu BreweryGrand prize — BeerLouisiana Purchase Exposition
• 1904Šopen / Vilniaus Tauras breweryGrand Prix / gold medal — Šopen breweryParis international exhibition
• 1912Cervecería La Tropical (original Havana brewery)Grand Prize — La TropicalGrand Prix de Paris

Not every medal on a label was won the way the label implies, and the most famous beer award in America is the cautionary tale. Pabst began tying blue silk ribbons around its Best Select bottles in 1882 — a decoration, not a prize. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition the judges issued the same non-comparative medal to every brewer who scored above threshold; there was no "best beer" title to win. Pabst declared itself grand prize winner anyway, and the line "Selected as America's Best in 1893" was added to the packaging in the 1950s. The brewery's own historians have since corrected the story.

A second kind sits between real and invented: the entry-fee quality label, where a producer pays to submit and the large majority of submissions receive a medal. Those are real certificates from real organisations — they are simply a different kind of thing from a juried competition, and a record that files them side by side without saying so flatters one and cheapens the other. This archive holds both kinds, and the classification has begun: the mechanics column in the table above labels the largest bodies from their own published judging rules — comparative where medals are limited and judges may award nothing, quality label where every entrant above a scoring threshold is awarded (Monde Selection, in its own words a non-competitive quality label, awarded 87.9% of its 2015 entrants), exhibitionfor the world's-fair era. Everything not yet researched stays unclassified rather than guessed from its name.

A subset of the record goes deeper than a line of text: 465 medals held as typed relationships between 18 competitions — each an organisation in this archive with its own record — and the breweries they judged, with the placement preserved. 28of them have been checked against the awarding body's own published results, which is the standard the whole layer is being raised toward.

• Best in Show5
• Brewery of the Year3
• Champion3
• Country Winner3
• Gold127
• Silver104
• Bronze107
• Winner6
• 1st place3
• 2nd place1
• 3rd place2
• Honourable Mention1
• Other100

Largest structured competitions: BC Beer Awards (103) · Brewers Cup of California (83) · Canadian Brewing Awards & Conference (59) · Alberta Beer Awards (45) · Canada Beer Cup (41) · Great American Beer Festival (37)

1,200 of 10,993 breweries here carry award records — 11% of the archive. That is a statement about our research, not about who has won things: most competition results have simply not been ingested yet. 3,873 of the 4,537 medals held carry a source a reader can follow; the rest arrived with the pass that recorded them and are being matched to official result lists. An award is never copied from a brewery's own marketing — it enters this record when the competition's own results, or a contemporary account, can place it.

Classification itself has surfaced defects worth naming: roughly a hundred rows carry their placementwhere the awarding body should be ("Gold" as a competition name), and a handful name a brewery in the body column. Those rows are real medals with a field filed wrong — a plumbing repair on the research list, recorded here rather than quietly fixed so the count above stays honest about what it counts.

Won something we have missed? Tell the archive — with the competition, category and year, so it can enter the record the same way everything else does.