We Were Named Brewery of the Year

Well, this is pretty damn cool.

Alvarado Street Brewery was named 2026 Brewery of the Year in the 15,000+ barrel category at the U.S. Open Beer Championship, bringing home seven medals across a lineup of beers made right here in Monterey County.

This was our first time entering the competition, and we sent off a lineup that we felt represented what our production team has been working on.

We came home with two golds, two silvers, three bronzes, and Brewery of the Year.

That still feels a little wild to type.

Seven Medals at the U.S. Open Beer Championship

Our seven medals included:

Gold — Double Dank Shake
Experimental IPA

Gold — Mai Tai P.A.
Single Hop IPA

Silver — WLMT
Imperial IPA

Silver — Monterey Beer
American Lager

Bronze — Lupo Luggage
Hazy IPA

Bronze — Blazerade
Specialty Beer

Bronze — YoE Eidolon
Mixed Culture Brett Beer

We're obviously proud of every medal, but seeing the range of beers represented on that list makes this one especially meaningful.

There's a lager next to a mixed-culture beer. A hazy IPA next to Mai Tai. Big, weird beers like Double Dank Shake and Blazerade are right there with Monterey Beer. They're very different beers, made for very different reasons, and all of them require their own kind of attention to get right.

The Same Beer You're Drinking

There's another part of this we're particularly proud of: the beers we entered came from cans straight off our production line.

They weren't special competition batches. They were the same beers being brewed, packaged, shipped, stocked in coolers, poured at our locations, and cracked open by all of you.

Behind every can of ASB beer is a whole lot of work most people never see. Brewing is obviously a huge part of it, but so are cellaring, quality control, packaging, warehousing, maintenance, logistics, and all of the little decisions made every day by a team of people who care deeply about what eventually ends up in your glass.

Being named Brewery of the Year belongs to that entire crew.

Building Our Next Chapter in Monterey County

The award also comes at a pretty incredible moment for us.

More than 12 years after opening our little brewpub in downtown Monterey, we're in the middle of building our next chapter in Castroville. Tanks are moving, our new brewery is taking shape, and we're thinking constantly about how to make our beer better and more consistently while building something that can carry ASB forward for a long time.

Through all of that change, Monterey County is still home.

This brewery wouldn't be what it is without the people who have supported us here from the beginning — the people who showed up at the Pub in 2014, who grab Mai Tai at the grocery store, who stop into our taprooms, who seek out the weird releases, who bring our beer to a barbecue, and who have allowed us to keep doing this for more than a decade.

So yeah, Brewery of the Year is rad.

But mostly, we're proud of the people who got us here, grateful to everyone who has supported us along the way, and really excited about where we're headed next.

Cheers from the whole ASB crew!