LIFE

Three-peat win for Hill Farmstead as world's best

Clover Whitham
Free Press Staff Writer
Phil Young pours beer at the Hill Farmstead Brewery retail store in Greensboro on Feb. 20, 2013.

Hill Farmstead Brewery in Greensboro has once again been named best in the world by RateBeer, the beer review website.

This is the third straight year the Vermont brewery tops the list of 100 breweries named best-of-the-year. (In 2014 it was ranked No. 2). Hill Farmstead, run by brewer Shaun Hill on the former dairy farm in the Northeast Kingdom where he grew up, beat out more than 22,500 brewers listed at RateBeer.

The annual RateBeer awards announced this week include rankings of best beers, best new brewers, best new releases and best places to get beer.

The co-founders of Foam Brewers, (left to right) Sam Keane, Robert Grim, Todd Haire and Dani Casey, in their waterfront location of 112 Lake St. in Burlington in March, 2016.

In the best new brewers category Foam Brewers in Burlington is ranked No. 6.

"Considering there were more than 6,500 new world wide brewers registered in this period, these 10 are an extremely elite bunch of the freshman class," RateBeer says about the new brewers list.

In the best places to get beer ranking by state, Waterbury establishments dominated:

  • Best brewpub: American Flatbread Burlington Hearth and Zero Gravity Craft Brewery, both in Burlington. 
  • Best restaurant: Prohibition Pig, Waterbury
  • Best brewer taproom: Hill Farmstead, Greensboro
  • Best bottle shop: Craft Beer Cellar, Waterbury
  • Best grocery: Hunger Mountain Co-op, Montpelier
  • Best bar: Blackback Pub, Waterbury

The annual honors come from the largest beer competition in the world, according to RateBeer. More than 470,000 beers from over 26,000 brewers worldwide were tallied.

The 10 best in the world breweries list is:

  1. Hill Farmstead Brewery
  2. Cycle Brewing
  3. Trillium Brewing Company
  4. Cigar City Brewing
  5. Cloudwater Brew Co
  6. Brouwerij de Molen
  7. De Garde Brewing
  8. Three Floyds Brewing Company
  9. Evil Twin Brewing
  10. Other Half Brewing

The top 100 brewers in the world are derived from scores based on RateBeer user reviews, but also includes historical all-around performance, a brewer's range of performance across styles, and other factors to compare newer and older, larger and smaller brewers under a single method of processing.

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