April 17, 2006 -- The biannual World Beer Cup, or WBC, as it’s known, has again been judged on American soil by scores of national and international judges, the results tabulated and the medals awarded. And congratulations to all the deserved winners.

As with any such contest, the WBC yielded some entirely predictable results, and others that seem to cut against all logic. This is the nature of blind judging, and no matter what you think of the results – available here: www.WorldBeerCup.org – there is no sense disparaging them. Beers were entered, judged by competent and responsible professionals, and ranked within their style class relative to their peers. This does not mean that the winners are the best of their style in the world, just that, on that day at that time and to those judges, they were deemed to be the best on offer.

So my complaint has nothing to do with the WBC results. No, my issue is with a press release I received in the wake of the awards being handed out, one which boasted: “World Beer Cup Showcases American Mastery of Brewing.”

Okay, so, as the release maintains, American breweries truly did win 65% of all the medals. But does this really mean that my neighbours to the south now dominate the global brewing world, or is it more related to the above-mentioned “on that day at that time” qualifier? Let’s look at the numbers and see.

According to the statistics available on the WBC website, out of the 540 breweries entered in the WBC, 304 or 56% of them were American. (Note that this number is for breweries, not beers. Given the proximity of the Seattle judging to the U.S. breweries, one might well assume that the Americans averaged more entries per brewery than did other countries, making their percentage of the 2,221 total beers entered even higher, but this is pure speculation since those numbers are not provided.) On that basis, the American "mastery" is not quite so impressive, to wit:

- American breweries comprised 56% of the entries and won 65% of the medals

- Germany breweries comprised 10% of the entries and won 11% of the medals.

- Belgian breweries comprised 3% of the breweries and won 6% of the medals

- Australia breweries comprised 1.85% of the entries and won 4.15% of the medals

To put this another way, on a medals won per brewery entered basis, the Americans did about as well as the Germans at about one medal for every two breweries entered. To match the per brewery performance of the Belgians, however, the Americans would have had to score 285 medals, or 44 more than were awarded in the entire competition, and to equal the results achieved by the ten Aussie breweries in the competition, they would have had to claim an additional 19 medals beyond that.

So while the Americans did undeniably well in this year’s WBC – and again, congratulations to all of the winning brewers and their breweries – perhaps all this talk of “mastery” would best be put off until the World Beer Cup runs a little more true to its name.

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