Brains Brewery’s Bayside lager wins silver at UK Indie Beer Awards

Brains Brewery’s Bayside lager picked up silver in the keg session lager category at the UK National Indie Beer Awards, a result that says plenty about where lager still wins. At 4.3% ABV, Bayside is Brains’ only lager, and that makes the medal feel less like a side note and more like a statement about how well the Cardiff brewery is handling one of beer’s hardest styles.

The award was presented on 19 March 2026 at Exhibition Centre Liverpool during BeerX UK, SIBA’s flagship event and, in its own framing, the UK’s biggest beer competition. Judges were brewers and industry experts, and the 2026 contest stretched across 44 categories, covering cask, keg, bottle and can, plus home-brewer recognition. That breadth matters because a lager medal has to stand up in a field where technical flaws are easy to spot and easy to punish.

Bayside’s brief is refreshingly direct. Brewed at Brains’ Dragon Brewery in Cardiff and inspired by classic lagers from around the world, it is built to do the one thing session lager has to do better than anything else: disappear quickly without disappearing into blandness. That balance is what likely carried weight with judges. In a crowded indie beer field, a clean, crisp lager can be more revealing than a heavily hopped IPA, because there is nowhere for fermentation faults, rough edges or muddled malt character to hide.

The beer had already taken gold at SIBA Cymru’s inaugural Welsh beer competition in Haverfordwest last autumn, which sent it into the national final in Liverpool. For Brains, the silver adds to a brewery story that stretches back to 1882, when Samuel Arthur Brain founded the company. Brains still says it has brewed independent Welsh beer since 1882, and it now operates from its state-of-the-art Cardiff brewery.

Nick Payne, Brains’ managing director, said the silver at BeerX would be one of the highlights of the year for the company and credited the brewing team for honing Bayside into a crisp, great-tasting lager. The result also landed in a strong year for Welsh beer more broadly, with one report putting the number of independent Welsh brewers winning awards across BeerX categories at 11. For independent breweries, that is the competitive edge lager still offers: if you can make it brilliant, people notice fast.