Late last week, the Crew noticed some online chatter about something called the Untappd Community Awards. This was new, at least to us, and led us over to the website where the beer ranking/recording app had compiled the collective ratings of every beer in certain style categories, divided up among the 50 states.

The final result of all this math? New Mexicans really like Ex Novo, Bosque, and La Cumbre, but overall there were multiple breweries ranked in a top-three vote for 46 separate style categories. The criteria for voting included some of the following rules.

• Only one vote per beer from each Untappd user. In other words, if you checked in Elevated IPA more than once in 2023, they only took your rating from your final check-in of the year.
• For a beer to be eligible, it needed a minimum of 50 check-ins from 50 different Untappd users in 2023.
• The style categories listed required at least three beers that met the above requirements in that style to be listed. In geographic terms, the brewery’s primary location is all that matters, not where the user was when he/she/they rated the beer.

Topping the charts in terms of number of top-three beers were the aforementioned trifecta, with Ex Novo (21 total), Bosque (18), and La Cumbre (16) each reaching double digits. The rest of this top 10 included Bow & Arrow (9), Gravity Bound (9), Downshift (7), Marble (6), Santa Fe (6), Sierra Blanca (6), and a final tie between Boxing Bear and Rowley Farmhouse Ales (4 apiece).

In terms of beers that came in first in their respective categories, Ex Novo again had the most with eight, followed by La Cumbre (6), Gravity Bound (5), Bosque (4), Bow & Arrow (4), and Downshift (4).

There were definitely style specializations visible, such as all four of Rowley Farmhouse Ales’ “winners” being split between two categories, Farmhouse Ale – Other and Farmhouse Ale – Saison. Quarter Celtic took the top spot in Red Ale – Irish and Scotch Ale/Wee Heavy with Crimson Lass and Kill or be KILT, respectively.

The various IPA categories were largely ruled by the trio of Ex Novo, La Cumbre, and Gravity Bound. The many lager categories were more spread out, with first-place finishers from Sierra Blanca, Bow & Arrow (2), Marble, Downshift (2), Gravity Bound, Bosque, La Cumbre (2), Ex Novo, and a pair of collaborations — The Most Elevated Cerveza in the World (Ex Novo/La Cumbre/Marble) and Put the Pilsner on a Pedestal (Pink Boots Society).

For us dark beer lovers, the top finishers in four stout categories came from Bow & Arrow (Coyote Waits), Ex Novo (Kill the Sun Macadamia Espresso), Boxing Bear (Chocolate Milk Stout), and Ex Novo again (Golden Menace).

As usual, this just shows how subjective beer can be. Odds are if you peruse the lists, some of your favorites will be absent from their categories. These are mostly just for fun, as rankings tend to be, a sort of talking piece and not much more. Still, enough people were chatting about it that we figured it was worth one of those statistical deep dives. Or, maybe that’s just the baseball fan in me, and we should generally ignore these sorts of things in the future.

Anyway, voice your own opinions about where your fellow beer drinkers got things right, and where they left you positively flummoxed for leaving out that one beer.

We’ll get back to the more serious beer news as the week rolls along, we promise.

Keep supporting local!

— Stoutmeister