Best Brewer in the Southern Hemisphere???

The annual RateBeer Best results are out. For those of you who are not familiar with this, it is the (self-proclaimed) biggest beer competition in the world:   “RateBeer Best was again the largest beer competition in the world -- more than 140,000 beers from over 12,000 brewers worldwide were tallied. A particular emphasis was placed on tastings made in the last twelve months.”   Last year, HopWired was declared the best beer of Australia and New Zealand and this year we did pretty well too: HopWired slipped to number 5 on that list but we still claimed both first and second place with Batch 18 and iStout respectively. In total, 6 of the top 10 beers from Australia and New Zealand were 8 Wired beers. We would be pretty ungrateful to complain about that!   We are also the first New Zealand brewery to feature on the Best Brewers in the World list, coming in 68th of more than 12,000 candidates. From the list of the top 100 it is also apparent that we are the best brewers in the southern hemisphere, which is extremely humbling!   Obviously 2011 has been a pretty good year for us. First winning the championship trophy at the Brewers Guild of NZ Awards and now this. The difference between the two competitions is obviously that one is judged by brewers and various industry specialists, whereas the other is judged by anyone who cares enough about beer to voice their opinion online. Beer geeks I would call them with no ill intention, I am one myself. Which one carries most merit? Hard to say. Obviously, isolated speaking, the industry specialist should know more about the technical aspects of beer but the beer geeks are in much higher numbers: In organised beer awards, the beers are judged by half a dozen experts, whereas on RateBeer.com, the beers are judged by an unlimited number of reviews.   At the end of the day, it makes me happier to please the consumer than the experts, so I welcome this result with as much gratitude as the official win last year. Winning both competitions only makes it so much more special.