Brewers Association Names 2026 Industry Award Winners Ahead of Philadelphia Conference

The man who created the original Harpoon IPA recipe is heading to Philadelphia with a Brewers Association Industry Award. Tod Mott, co-founder of Tributary Brewing Co. in Kittery, Maine, is one of three winners the Brewers Association announced, alongside Jamie Floyd of Ninkasi Brewing and Dr. Tom Shellhammer, the Nor'Wester Professor of Fermentation Science at Oregon State University. All three will be formally recognized at the Craft Brewers Conference, April 20-22.

Mott's arc through New England brewing spans more than three decades. After early work at Harpoon, where he drafted what became the original IPA recipe, he joined Portsmouth Brewery in New Hampshire in 2003 and spent over eight years there producing Kate the Great Imperial Stout, a beer with its own cult following. In 2014, he and his wife Galen opened Tributary, a 15-barrel brewery now helmed by their son Woody.

Floyd's story begins with a homebrewed stout in a campus co-op kitchen and runs through 11 years at Steelhead Brewery in Eugene before he and Nikos Ridge launched Ninkasi in June 2006. That founding brew day lasted 17 hours and produced Total Domination IPA. By 2011, Ninkasi had grown into the fastest-growing craft brewery in the country. Floyd also serves on the BA's technical committee, sits on the Oregon Brewers Guild board, and has judged at the Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup.

Shellhammer brings the academic rigor to round out the class. His lab at OSU focuses on how specific hop compounds contribute to aroma, flavor, foam, and stability in finished beer. He spent the 2008-2009 academic year as a Fulbright Scholar and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Technical University of Berlin, and has served on the Board of Examiners for the Institute of Brewing and Distilling in London since 2007.

"Each of this year's award recipients has made a profound and lasting impact on the craft brewing community," the Brewers Association said in the announcement.

The BA has handed out industry awards since 1987, and this year's class threads together the three emphases the organization consistently highlights: innovation, professional development, and advocacy for independent craft brewers. Announcing the winners two weeks before CBC frames what Philadelphia's sessions will amplify: brewing science, mentorship, and the quality controls that small breweries increasingly need to compete.