Grains of Wrath Panopticon IPA
(Camas, Washington)
If you could take everything that brewers have learned the past few decades about pedal-to-metal hop character, include all the accelerations in breeding, picking, and processing, all those innovations that—in liquid form—punch the nose and light up the eyes, and then hand that rocket-powered dragster over to Formula 1 technicians, let them lighten the weight, refine the system, edit out the extraneous, sculpt it back into a sleek West Coast form, and balance and polish it until it positively shines … you’d have Panopticon.
Aromatically, there are luminescent citrus strands of lime peel, limoncello, grapefruit zest, and orange blossom, weaving through sweeter Southern Hemisphere pineapple, passion fruit, peach, and guava—all grounded in fresh pine boughs and the slightest diesel.
“Kaboom,” Stan writes in his notes. “Hop juice, in the best way—but also the whole hop, not just the lupulin/juicy part. ... Refined. The IPA a person who understands lagers makes.” Meanwhile, the bitterness is evident and firm, unrepentant, and yet it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
This is the beer we couldn’t get enough of. It scored 100 with our blind panel earlier this year—pretty much a shoo-in—but it did, you know, take a few more re-tastings to ensure, confirm, and extra doubly re-confirm that, yep, this was a stunner. And while these 20 beers are not in any particular order, it just felt right to slot this one at the top.
Kros Strain Barrelywine Vol. 9: Port & Bourbon
(La Vista and Omaha, Nebraska)
This is the third time in four years that Kros Strain has appeared in our annual Best 20—unprecedented, and not a call we make lightly. Ultimately, however, both of these cask-finished barleywines—which our blind panel scored 100 and 99, respectively—silenced any qualms. Kros Strain’s remarkable run reflects the deft approach to flavor they take with all their beers—note that their previous Best 20 picks were a saison and a hazy IPA. Yet these two barleywines weren’t just our favorites among the higher-gravity barrel-aged beers we tasted; they were two of the best beers we drank, of any style, all year long.
Tasting the Port version earlier this year, we recall thinking, “It’s truly amazing what beer can be.” Just when you think you’ve tasted everything—experienced all that beer has to offer—a Barrelywine Vol. 9 comes along to shake that assumption to the core. Expressive but reserved, rich and indulgent yet beautifully paced, characterful but disciplined—like a talented actor, it conveys so much with nuance and subtlety. Vinous threads are more sideways glances than spoken lines. They build a presence without having to shout, as the dark, sugary, caramel depths create a lush environment for the hazelnut shell and dark-fruit midtones, while notes of dried cherries, apricots, and craisins punctuate the aromas. “At its heart, a perfect expression of what malt can do, enhanced by barrels,” Stan writes. So say we all.
Goldfinger Heller Bock
(Downers Grove, Illinois)
Finding space for innovation within a traditional style is a tricky endeavor—the window is narrow for a beer to feel relatable while still reading as new. Tom Beckmann at Goldfinger walks the tightrope with this pale bock, using the higher ABV to support a more intense hop load while keeping the flavor and expression on the edge of the modern Noble world. It’s unapologetically aromatic when fresh, and when we revisited it for our Best in Beer tasting—from a can that was then six months old—it still felt lively and nimble.
Elderflower notes meld with a pure malt sweetness, suggesting vanilla sugar-cookie dough. Stan was impressed by the “immense fresh malt aroma” and “floral, perfume-like hops that combine with the malt and alcohol for honey-like flavors perfectly balanced by clean bitterness.”
It finds balance at this scale, despite notable ethanol presence, through thoughtful hopping that pushes to the edge of what we consider “floral.” They’re fresh but rich and unsparing, with citrus zest and woody notes that feel Noble but also relate to American hop aromas and flavors.
That the beer held up so well after so long in the can speaks to the quality of process that Goldfinger has developed.
Boerenerf Oude Gueuze 2023
(Huizengen, Belgium)
After being seriously endangered a quarter-century ago, authentic gueuze started to catch on again in Belgium, of all places—and it boomed with overseas interest, feeding heady optimism that all Earthlings had finally discovered one of their most fascinating and complex drinks.
Well, the mood has cooled, and thankfully it takes a few years to get a proper gueuze into bottles. It also takes patience and faith as well as money and know-how. None of the newer operations over-invested themselves, as far as we can tell. Instead—in case you haven’t checked in on Pajottenland lambic lately—there are several small producers that will probably stay small, and they all have their own points of view.
So, if you love gueuze, you win.
Boerenerf has a point of view, and you can taste it. In Brussels in May, we ordered a bottle at the Spinnekopke—a tavern with a 260-year history, recently emerged heathy and happy under new ownership, after an unfortunate tourist-trap phase—because we’d heard the brewery’s name but hadn’t tasted the liquid. The nose was comfortingly classic, with notes of musty grapefruit, white wine, a squeeze of lemon, and fresh linen. The flavor, meanwhile, was delicate—bright, airy, with supple acidity and a dusty-dry finish that just evaporates into cobwebs.
We were drinking liquid spring at the start of spring, marveling at how an old tradition can still blossom, stay relevant, and prove timeless.
Ladd & Lass Zoospaloos
(Seattle)
Czech-style dark lager presents a number of potential pitfalls for brewers. Too much roast, and it feels stouty. Not enough residual malt sweetness, and it can taste ashy or astringent. Achieving malt fullness without excess body, and in a very drinkable sub-5 percent format, isn’t easy. The best Czech tmavý convinces you that it’s one thing as you drink it, then finishes as another. This small brewery from Seattle does all those things with Zoospaloos, a beer our judges scored a 98.
There’s a dynamic balance here between hop flavor, hop bitterness, malt flavor, and malt fullness—the malt provides notes of nuts and bread-crust that are more suggestions than statements—and the herbal tinge to the hop flavor is just enough to provide personality and structure, but no more. Like the old saying goes, the secret to great Czech dark lager is taking one flavor step forward and then two steps back. The editing and refinement process is integral to the beer’s success, and that’s exactly what they accomplish here, capturing that elusive blend of flavor and drinkability—without ever appearing to try too hard.
Brewskey Dandy
(Montreal)
This imperial coffee stout from Montreal up-and-comers Brewskey grabbed our attention with its judicious use of coconut alongside the sweetness-enhancing vanilla top-note, achieving a coffee-and-chocolate character that our judges describe as “premium dark chocolate Mounds bar.” It achieves this through a luxurious yet lithe malt body, layered with deep roast, nougat midtones, and a brisk espresso note that never feels excessive. Nutty tones appear as it warms, with a balsamic-like depth in the body—the more typical dark-fruit notes morph into something even richer. Needless to say, we don’t often find this kind of richness and depth in the world of “pastry” stouts, as the category is often dominated by sweet beers for the sake of sweetness. However, Dandy expresses the best of what we love about the style—pleasure and discipline with tight refinement.
Pure Project Rain
(San Diego)
The first time Jamie tasted Rain was, ironically enough, before a panel discussion on “trendy styles” at our brewery accelerator event in San Diego about seven years ago. Brewer Winslow Sawyer brought cans of the pilsner for panelists who we were ostensibly supposed to talk about hazy IPA, sour beer, and pastry stout—but it was clear what the brewers in the group really wanted to drink. That’s the same thing we all sense now when drinking Rain—it’s not a beer calculated to appease a marketing team’s product and sales goals; it’s a beer designed by passionate brewers, and it’s a beer they designed because they wanted to drink it themselves. That kind of enthusiasm is the force behind the post-pandemic explosion in lager brewing, but Rain was a Pure Project passion project long before many of their contemporaries caught the bug.
Having experienced it over years now, we can trace its evolution, and its most recent form is the best it’s ever been. As the top-scoring German-style pilsner in our lager issue earlier this year, it beat stiff competition, and the quality of its floral hop character made all the difference. As we revisited it for this issue, Kate noted “pink and red orchid and chamomile tea.” Nothing is ever quite bitter enough for Joe—a small quibble in the big picture, here—but he loves the “pleasant hit of sulfur followed by dried herb, lime peel, and slight tobacco.”
The secret of Rain isn’t just in the quality of its hops; it’s in its swagger. Few convey this kind of personality, described by various reviewers as “verve” or a “spiky statement without being rough or unpleasant.” Rain has its own strut but never wanders past the edges of comforting familiarity.
Timmermans Griotteke
(Itterbeek, Belgium)
Our infatuation began at the Toer de Geuze, tasting bottles in the historic brewery’s pub as local families filled the courtyard and rocked with the band. That experience was a highlight, for sure, but the beer stuck with us, floating near the tops of our brains as one of the most delicious and intriguing things we tasted all year. Timmermans was long a commercial lambic also-ran, but clever owners hired clever brewers, and Thomas Vandelanotte has been leading the shift toward authenticity and attention to microbiological details. He kindly shipped us more, and Griotteke held up as beautifully in the conference room as it did amid that revelry.
This is an oude kriek with flourishes: It macerates with traditional, intense, hard-to-get local Schaerbeek cherries; and, besides the usual wine barrels, a small portion rests in bourbon barrels—not enough to taste like bourbon, but enough to add vanilla whispers that evoke almonds and cobbler crust. The cherry’s flavor is deep, fulsome, vinous, rounding sharp acidity with a bright, fleeting punch that splinters into austerity. It’s a rare bottle that can shine amid a frenetic experience, then shine again and again as an experience unto itself.
The Big Friendly Vanilla Oil Boom
(Oklahoma City)
Looking back on the barrel-aged stout results from our blind-panel reviews early this year, we are taken aback: Vanilla Boom is not the thickest, nor the plushest, nor the most indulgent in the “pastry” realm. There’s no 30-plus-hour boil. Instead, it somewhat echoes the previous generation of barrel-aged beers—defined, to a large extent, by Bourbon County—where strategic, flavor-focused design creates beer worth aging and a foundation on which to layer creative ingredients. Like an ultramodern home, it’s more luxurious in its minimalism—large gestures, negative space—than in its density.
Tasted again for this issue, blindly, we noted how well the roasted barley blends seamlessly with the vanilla. Bits of dark fruit and chocolate are at play—booze-soaked raisins coated in high-percentage cacao, with burnt s’more in the retronasal. Graham-cracker top-notes and nutty toffee showcase the width of the vanilla spectrum. A bit of cinnamon creeps into the flavor, with a touch of espresso, but the roast and coffee bitterness walk the finest tightrope between too much for today’s consumers and not enough to balance.
Despite its name, the Big Friendly is a very small brewery with modest intentions and a hard-working team. The barrel-aged stout program is tiny, and they don’t have the benefit of deep blending stock—which makes the 99 score our judges gave this beer all the more impressive.
Figueroa Mountain Big Cone Black Ale
(Buellton, California)
Maybe it’s the veering of modern IPA toward sweeter, riper, more tropical flavors that has us pining for, well, pine, and looking more favorably than ever at American black ale. (Call it “black IPA” or “Cascadian dark” if you want, as long as it tastes great—but we like the sound and sensibility of “American black.”) When we see it on draft, once in a full moon, we nearly always order it.
Led by head brewer Kevin Ashford, the Fig Mountain production team is relentless in its focus on quality, landing beers here as divergent as a smooth-drinking red lager (2022) and an American black ale (2024). We don’t put anything past them.
Pulling liberally from all our notes: We pick up orangey spruce tips, Guatemalan café au lait, mint, and chocolate-citrus candy in the aroma. On the sip, it’s bright light-roast coffee, blueberry, high-percentage dark chocolate, cocktail Old Fashioneds, burnt bread crust, and luscious malt. The herb-forward bitterness is noisy but honed—never harsh or overly resinous—working in concert with the restrained roast to roundly balance the moderate sweetness that binds the whole package.
After tasting and talking it over, enthusiastically, we honestly can’t remember how or why this style fell out of fashion, or why we don’t see more of it. More, please. Your challenge, however, is to make it at least half as good as Big Cone.
Gold Dot Helles Lager
(McMinnville, Oregon)
There are simple ways to make good beer, but the art of the sublime requires deeper know-how, granular attention to detail, an understanding of how countless tiny pieces fit together to affect the whole, and a strong view of how that whole ought to be—how it ought to look, smell, and taste. One of the great ironies of craft lager is how damned difficult it is to make something that should be so effortless to drink.
At Heater Allen in the Willamette Valley, meanwhile, the lager power couple of Lisa Allen and former Wayfinder brewmaster Kevin Davey are meeting expectations—that is to say, they’re brewing some of the most sublime lagers in the country.
If the body here feels a tad light for a Bavarian helles, it also features slightly nudged-up dryness and bitterness that whisper of Traunstein, Schönram—and America. Regardless, everything is where it ought to be—a touch of matchstick lager-sulfur; light, crackery, honeyed-bread malt; fresh, lemony-floral hopping; structured bitterness, delicate sweetness—then it all just disappears, moreish and ethereal, leaving you with an angst, somehow thirstier than you were before.
A fun thought: Allen and Davey launched Gold Dot only last year after taking over the brewery from Rick Allen. So, in a way, they’re just getting started.
Pinthouse Mosaic Takedown
(Austin)
This isn’t Pinthouse’s first rodeo on our best list—its Green Battles pale ale was here in 2019. It gets an asterisk for 2022, when Cellarmaker won a spot with its version of Pinthouse’s Training Bines. This year, however, no asterisk. No fine print. Nor is this Mosaic Takedown’s first takedown this year: It walked away from Oregon’s Best of the West Coast National IPA competition as a champion.
Our understanding is that this is a layering of at least four forms of Mosaic—whole-leaf, T-90 pellets, Cryo, and YCH 702 flowable aroma extract. We didn’t know any of that when it sang to us at the table, though. We knew we were picking up notes of berries, cucumber peel, stone fruit, sweaty navel oranges, Sunkist candies, and lime zest. We knew that it slapped with juicy hop flavor—a banger, in the way great IPAs were juicy right before they went all soft and hazy—with suggestions of green mango, guava, unripe strawberry, checked with a pure stripe of clean malt and an evident bitterness that keeps an edge to it. The framework is smooth and structured, harmonious, offering a launch pad for possibly the best that Mosaic has to offer.
Let’s call it reassuring that one of the best breweries in the country at getting the most from hops is continuing to advance and refine its game. How many levels do you need to beat, Pinthouse, before you become the boss?
Black Lung Left Fork
(Round Lake Beach, Illinois)
Maybe Kentucky common is a “homebrewer style”—meaning, it’s been around a while, appears in all the guidelines, and is straight-up kryptonite to commercial breweries. Homebrewer styles don’t sell. Yet here we find ourselves in a beautiful space—welcome!—where we don’t care about what sells. Excellence is excellence. And we’ll skip the pedantry over what, exactly, a Kentucky common is, should be, or should taste like—it’s interesting, sure, and pedantry is a big part of what we do as editors and writers … but not right here. None of that is relevant to what makes a beer great.
Tasted by our blind panel in the spring, Left Fork scored highest in a category we called Amber, Red, or Brown Ale. Its drinkability, however—at 5.2 percent ABV, with its corn-lightened body—lands it somewhere between a nutty autumnal brown and a smooth Texas bock. “Very acorn,” Kate writes of the aroma. “Light coffee roast. Pumpernickel bread. Dry leaves.” Our panel noted the “fresh, damp undergrowth of a deep forest,” calling the flavor “a beautiful ride that includes a piney spritz and warmed graham cracker from the heat of a recently toasted marshmallow.”
Yet it packs all that character into a light, dry frame—it begs to be guzzled. It’s got that rare combination of character and drinkability that makes you wonder why it doesn’t sell—and we don’t know, maybe this one does; we’ll have to ask the folks at Black Lung. However: Did we also think it would be pretty dope to have one of the homebrewiest homebrewer styles ever here in the Best 20? Maybe. And yet, as Stan says, “As a historical beer, it would not have tasted this good.”
Offset Dopo
(Park City, Utah)
A top scorer in the pale-ale zone of our IPA issue, this hazy LIPA—or “Lie IPA”—is a deliberate attempt at misdirection. Preciptating the lie are Utah laws that prevent beers of more than 5 percent ABV from being served on draft. So, while it’s not an IPA by contemporary U.S. standards (let’s not use the dreaded “session” nomenclature), it’s an attempt to capture everything about the higher-ABV drinking experience—substantial body, rich flavor with indulgent tropical fruit, silky mouthfeel—in a beer of 5 percent ABV. Pink guava, passion fruit, and papaya hit the nose with a touch of pineapple, setting up a sweet expectation that thankfully doesn’t materialize. A pithy bitterness with a bit of tropical-fruit rind maintains a tight structure in the sip. But it never feels thin or watery, despite the scale and the bitter turn—small flashes of orange flare up in the dry finish to remind you of its juicy origin. As our blind panel said in their review, the true accomplishment is pulling all these flavors together in a way that supports the drinkability but doesn’t create a rough or disruptive note. Instead, Offset has honed and buffed the various flavor notes into a cohesive, polished whole that plays by the rules they must follow without missing a step.
Funky Fauna Unholy River
(Sisters, Oregon)
If we told you Funky Fauna had been on our radar for a while, we’d be lying. Michael Frith and Danielle Burns opened their tiny outfit in 2021, central Oregon’s first new brewery in a couple of years. The Ale Apothecary’s Paul Arney mentioned them to Kate only months ago (see “Brewing Saison: The Taste of Rustic,” beerandbrewing.com). They hadn’t submitted beers for review until this issue, but this wasn’t their only high scorer (see pages 88–90).
Funky Fauna’s jam is saison fermented with locally sourced cultures. Unholy River—a collab with nearby Sunriver—also features lemon juice and peaches, fermented on oak and dry-hopped with Citra, Lemon Drop, and Krush. Brightness was clearly the goal, and brightness they achieved. Lemon is pronounced in the nose, with hop-driven orange blossom and shrubby herbal tea, as the Brett evokes lime peels in chardonnay—all rooted in wood. On the sip, Kate notes “a lemon-sorbet quality” as “hops weave through like an accent,” with mint that complements lemon and fleshy peach in the finish. Herbal notes provide structure for the fruit, giving it purpose.
It feels lighter than its 5.6 percent ABV—buoyant, with cheerful flavors and amiable balance. It’s highly approachable yet thoughtful and deeply engaging. Funky Fauna: Welcome to our radar, and the world’s.
10 Barrel Crush
(Bend, Oregon)
In the run-up to this issue, a few interesting things happened. First, 10 Barrel’s marketing team sent us some Crush beers, aiming to stoke interest after their purchase by cannabis giant Tilray. Naturally, we pushed some to our blind panel, and the Huckleberry Crush scored a category-leading 99/100. Not long after, the news got out that Tilray had decimated the 10 Barrel R&D brewing team. That team included Russell Scherer Award winner Tonya Cornett, whose incredible work there developed the Crush series—and a remarkable grip of GABF and World Beer Cup medals in sour- and fruit-beer categories over the past decade.
As the four of us sat down to blindly taste the top scorers and wild-card entries for this list, we weren’t thinking about the politics, just the quality. And on both the Huckleberry and Cucumber variations, our views were unanimous: These beers play with perception, offering experiences that connect fruit and beer in remarkable ways. Huckleberry Crush draws you in with Mountain Berry Punch Kool-Aid vibes, quickly scrubbing that sweetness with tangy acidity and a broad, dryish, pastry-dough malt that drives home the pie metaphor. Cucumber Crush finds a sublime level of acidity and fresh cucumber character that feels light but substantial, with a pulp-and-peel natural edge. It’s spa water with a frisky side.
As we pondered whether to include these beers in this year’s Editors’ Picks, we also unanimously agreed that it would be a shame to miss the opportunity to celebrate the incredible work that Tonya and her team have done on these beers for so many years—or to highlight what should go down as one of the worst management decisions regarding brewing talent in recent memory.
Old Thunder Mild Stillage
(Pittsburgh)
Old Thunder has been creeping up on us over the years. We’ve tasted the beers, and our blind panel has reviewed them—and this one scored a 99—but we’ve never dug into the brewery’s story. When in Pittsburgh a few months ago, Jamie made a point of rectifying that, venturing out to their taproom early one evening for a pint and food-truck dinner. On draft, Mild Stillage was exactly what you’d want a dark mild to be—light, nutty, and toasty, with soft bready edges, faint herbal-orange hop note, and a subtle apple-skin ester. It’s nuanced and deep despite its 3.8 percent ABV, but it’s not a beer that demands your attention.
Sipping the beer on a quiet corner of Old Thunder’s patio, outside a brewery packed with trivia enthusiasts, it’s natural to ponder why more American breweries don’t put weight behind such flavorful small beers. Mild Stillage makes a great flavor argument for why they should.
Strange Days Paragon
(Kansas City, Missouri)
If you haven’t noticed by now, the North American brewing world is on a Czech lager kick. Serious brewers no longer call any pale lager “Czech-style” just because it includes Czech malt and hops. Now, we better understand malt fullness in combination with a dry finish, whether decoction-derived or not; we understand great foam; we demand fine hop character; and we understand that “crispy” is a descriptor that doesn’t belong here.
Yet there’s still a sliding scale. Americans prefer lager on the lighter, drier side, and most American brewers still bend even their Czech-style lagers in that direction. Strange Days finds a happy medium with Paragon, our top-rated Czech-style pale lager earlier this year—and a beer that proves American brewers are paying attention. From its stellar foam and beautifully aromatic Saaz hops—bright and herbal, a touch grassy, lightly spicy—to its medium body and bready malt, it finds a way to capture those nuances of Czech aroma and flavor within a context slightly modified for American lager drinkers. As we tasted it again in consideration for this list, it stood out as deserving the 98 score our blind panel gave it—more substantial than other Czech-style pale lagers we tasted, with a tight finish and pronounced American bigness in the hops. In that sense, it’s the best of both the New and Old Worlds.
pFriem Japanese Lager
(Hood River, Oregon)
Let us consider the Cartesian plane of character and drinkability, putting character on the X-axis, drinkability on the Y. As craft drinkers, our focus is often out to the right—up high or down low, whatever, just make it flavorful. Mass-market beer, on the other hand, lives way up high and steers clear of the starboard side. At least one of us (hi, it’s me, Joe) has been drinking a hell of a lot of Asahi—very high, very left on that plane. Japanese rice lagers are not about flavor.
But they could be.
Leave it to the masters at one of the country’s most decorated breweries to get it done, with their well-earned reputation for lagers as precise as a Johnny Unitas flattop. The short list of brewers we’d trust to brew the kind of rice lager you’d find in the dictionary next to “crisp,” yet still thread in some intriguing flavor and aroma, probably starts with Josh Pfriem.
This is a beer that vaulted over other strong candidates at our editorial panel, tasting blindly. Kate observes lily-orchid notes that get an herbal counterpoint. “Strikingly bright,” Stan writes of the aroma, “like floral headlights pointed right at you. Cracker-like, super crisp from the outset.”
But, of course, you could also tune all that out and just drink a whole bunch of it—with karaage and friends, with a warm evening, or with nothing and nobody at all, wallowing in the melancholy of there not being nearly enough of it in your fridge.
Jolly Pumpkin Bam Bière
(Dexter, Michigan)
If you want to call this a sentimental pick after the recent death of Ron Jeffries, who founded Jolly Pumpkin two decades ago, we’ll neither disagree nor apologize. Bam would belong here anyway, any year. Even in cans, as it’s often found today, it remains a reference point for the branching-off of American farmhouse-inspired brewing.
It also happens to be fucking delicious.
Bam is an old friend to some of us, but many more haven’t had the pleasure—getting into interesting beer more recently, perhaps, after the great mixed-culture bubble-bursting of the late 2010s. So, journey with us: back to a time when none could imagine that foeders would be used for lagers, and when too many brewers took the word “sour” literally.
American farmhouse ales have found their restraint since then, but Ron and Bam were already there—think Petit Orval with amped-up Brett and just a light kiss of lambic. The high-key, minty-green hop-and-funk nose is cool and sharp, intertwined with dried apricot, pineapple rind, lemon peel, and herbs freshly sprouted from potting soil. Gentle acidity tiptoes across the palate, offering a fleeting spotlight to stone fruit before a smooth, dusty fade into a softly bitter, utterly dry denouement. It’s rustic and complex yet far from intense—a weave of subtle threads that maintain balance. Light at 4.5 percent ABV, golden in color, tart, dry, and quenching, it’s one of those rare mixed-culture creations you could crush by the pint, given a chance.
Drink it on a warm day, by all means, but—if you want to honor Ron—never on a boat. He didn’t trust those things.