Third Eye Brewing ties U.S. Open Beer Championship medal record

Third Eye Brewing Co. in Hamilton tied the U.S. Open Beer Championship’s single-year medal record with nine medals and emerged as the 2026 Grand National Champion. For a Greater Cincinnati brewery with taprooms in Hamilton and Sharonville, the result is more than a trophy shelf moment, it is national-level proof of quality that travels beyond the taproom.

The competition announced its 2026 medal winners, Breweries of the Year and Grand National Champion on July 15 in Oxford, Ohio. The U.S. Open Beer Championship bills itself as the third-largest beer competition in the United States, and the 2026 event drew thousands of entries across 180 categories and subcategories. In that kind of field, medals function as a hard signal to drinkers, distributors and brewers who follow award tables as closely as they follow grain bills.

Third Eye’s haul came in at five gold medals, two silver medals and two bronze medals. The brewery was also named Brewery of the Year in the 2,001-5,000 barrel category, a bracket that gives some shape to the scale at which judges saw its work. The nine-medal total tied the competition record set by Maui Brewing Co. in 1990, putting the Hamilton brewery into a very small historical club.

Ohio breweries had a strong showing overall, winning 101 medals at the 2026 competition, including 30 gold, 35 silver and 36 bronze. Ohio breweries also swept the medals in the Chili Beer category, a reminder that the state’s beer scene is not relying on one or two names to carry its reputation. Third Eye’s result fits that broader picture while still standing out on its own, especially for a brewery operating in two Greater Cincinnati locations.

For serious beer drinkers, a record-tying medal run tells you the brewery is doing the unglamorous work well, from recipe development to fermentation control to packaging consistency. For homebrewers, it offers a useful benchmark for what award-winning execution looks like when judges line up dozens of categories and thousands of entries against each other. That is the value of a haul like this: it gives Third Eye a credibility boost, a destination-story angle for local traffic, and a stronger hand in every conversation that starts with where the next great pint should come from.