What the Oregon Beer Awards Reveal About Beer Trends

A week ago, organizers handed out medals (and tap handles) for the annual Oregon Beer Awards. Now in its tenth year, the OBAs have become an important fixture in Oregon’s beer culture. Around a hundred breweries enter each year, which amounts to around 40% of the state’s breweries. The categories were created by the competition and don’t observe those created for the GABF and World Beer Cup. It’s a more condensed competition, with just thirty categories. This approach has been influential, guiding similar state competitions in Texas, New York, Alaska, Montana, Colorado, and Ohio.

Blind judging is conducted by a diverse group anchored by working brewers. More than that, in an effort to make sure they’re finding the best beers, the organizers use a complex system where beers are evaluated by multiple judges. Because of these measures, winning breweries feel like each award is an endorsement of excellence from their peers. Breweries enter a lot of competitions, but in Oregon, the OBAs matter.

You can find the winners here, and that site also has a video of the awards ceremony, from which I grabbed the still at the top of the post. The big winners this year were pFriem and Breakside, with seven medals apiece, Sunriver with five, Fort George with four, and four more breweries with three. The competition cited pFriem (large), ColdFire (medium), and Terranaut (small) as breweries of the year. It’s especially impressive for Terranaut, less than a year old, which picked up two gold medals. Finally, they chose Deschutes’ Gary Fish as their Hall of Fame inductee. Congrats to all the winners.

Since this fest has been around a decade, I though it might be nice to have a look at some of the trends as a way of charting how beer is evolving in our fair state.

Style Trends

Competition Director Ben Edmunds sent me the results of all the awards going back to 2017 (the first year, 2016, did not have a formal judging competition). In that time, the competition has shifted the categories around quite a bit, dumping some, adding some, and combining others into different categories. Some of the categories have remained fairly constant throughout, however, and it’s interesting to see which ones have been popular and held their popularity, and which have fallen off.

Below is a graph based on the number of entries each category received relative to the other thirty categories. In all but one year, IPAs received the most entries, and fresh hop beers in the IPA category were a close number two. Hazy IPAs have fluctuated a bit, but remain popular, as have pilsners. The categories for classic US and UK styles, however, have seen a precipitous decline. And interestingly, the sour and mixed-fermentation categories have bounced around quite a bit. All of that tracks pretty closely with the market, except the mixed-fermentation and sour categories. I am open to theories about those!

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(Let’s put a pin in this: in 2025, the competition split the IPA category into two: American IPA and West Coast IPA. The most-entered category this year was West Coast IPA. I am very curious how these styles/categories will evolve. Prior to hazy IPAs, Oregon had a lot of [fairly hazy] IPAs already. What we call “West Coast” IPAs are really a reaction to hazies, and it appears like “American IPAs” represent the pre-hazy lineage. Wonder what the categories will be in another ten years?)

Big Winners

Each year, some breweries do really well. In 2024, for example, Sunriver won an amazing 13 of the 87 medals (15%). Still, it’s typical that only about a third of the breweries winning medals win more than one—two-thirds of the breweries usually just win a single award. I don’t know if this year was an outlier, but something different happened: nearly half of the breweries winning awards won more than one.

Although I don’t have a graph for gold medal winners, that’s a bit interesting, too. In 2023, only two breweries won more than one (Sunriver and 10 Barrel). The number jumped to five last year and seven this year—though no brewery won more than two golds. The 2025 multi-gold medalists were: Crux, Grand Fir, Living Haus, McMenamins, nebuleus, Tarranaut, and Wayfinder.

Finally, it’s always remarkable to me that certain breweries manage to consistently win medals in certain categories or win a bunch of medals every year. Winning consistently is hard to do, and winning a lot of medals consistently is even harder. One thing we can see is that it’s not random, either. In 2023, Whitney Burnside was brewing at 10 Barrel, which tied for most medals, something they had done routinely. The next year, she entered beer for her own brewery, Grand Fir, which made the list for most medals—and left 10 Barrel off the list (they picked up two wins in 2024). In the past year, new 10 Barrel owner Tilray laid off the remaining talent at the brewery, and 10 Barrel didn’t win a single medal.

I’ll leave you with the final graph.