New Jersey breweries win four medals at 2026 World Beer Cup
Wander Back Beerworks’ gold in Munich-Style Helles led a four-medal New Jersey haul, with wins spread from Wildwood to Florence.
New Jersey did not just pick up medals at the 2026 World Beer Cup. It put four breweries on the board in four different corners of the state, and the sharpest signal came from Vineland: Wander Back Beerworks won gold for Wander Back Lager in the Munich-Style Helles category, a lane so crowded that a win there says a lot about control, not just ambition.
That gold landed in a field that was larger than most beer fans ever see in one place. The competition, held April 22 in Philadelphia alongside the Craft Brewers Conference & BrewExpo America, marked the World Beer Cup’s 30th year. Brewers Association said 353 medals were awarded to 273 producers across 118 categories, after 8,166 entries from 1,644 breweries representing 50 nations were evaluated by 255 judges from 50 countries. One bronze went unawarded in Belgian-Style Witbier, which left 353 of 354 possible awards distributed.
The rest of the New Jersey haul showed how broad the state’s brewing range has become. MudHen Brewing Company in Wildwood earned silver for Captain Doug’s Porter, another win for a brewpub that opened in April 2018 in a former Harley-Davidson dealership and still brews on-site with 8 to 12 rotating beers on tap. Odd Bird Brewing in Stockton took bronze for House Red in the Experimental Beer category, a fitting result for a brewery operating out of the Eagle Gas Station building and pouring through a vintage English beer engine. Subculture Artisan Ales in Florence added a bronze for Burton Reynolds in Historical Beer, reinforcing its reputation for leaning into old-world methods and German-inspired styles.
Put together, the medals read like a map of a more mature beer state. New Jersey breweries had already posted a strong World Beer Cup showing in 2024, when state breweries won four gold medals and a bronze, so this was not a one-off burst of luck. Wander Back’s win carried extra weight because the brewery had been brewing with help from Hidden Sands Brewery in Egg Harbor Township while working toward a permanent Vineland facility. A gold in Munich-Style Helles from a setup like that says New Jersey is building more than a few headline names. It is building a deeper bench, and the World Beer Cup keeps proving it.
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