ZwanzigZ’s Fulcrum stout wins World Beer Cup gold again

ZwanzigZ Pizza & Brewing’s Fulcrum imperial stout kept doing what flashy, short-lived entries often cannot: it beat the field twice at the World Beer Cup. The Columbus, Indiana, beer took gold again in 2025, giving brewmaster Mike Rybinski a rare back-to-back story built on a style that never needed gimmicks to make its point.

The 2025 World Beer Cup awards were announced May 1 in Indianapolis during the Craft Brewers Conference and BrewExpo America, and the competition landed in the American-Style Black Ale or American-Style Stout category. Fulcrum finished ahead of Thunderbolt Stout from Valhöll Brewing in Poulsbo, Washington, which won silver, and Lights Out from Project 9 Brewing in Seattle, which earned bronze. The Brewers Association calls the World Beer Cup the world’s most prestigious professional beer and cider competition, and Fulcrum’s second gold, after its 2022 win, is the kind of repeat result that signals more than a lucky run.

Rybinski’s pitch for the beer reaches back more than two decades, long before the 2012 version took shape at ZwanzigZ. He had already been working through related derivatives and swapping ideas with other brewers, especially Pete Crowley and Joe Formanek, while refining the mix of dark chocolate malt, dry hopping, oats and balance that now defines the stout. His experience stretches well beyond this one beer, with more than 25 years of major-medal history and a previous gold at Walter Payton’s Roundhouse, but Fulcrum reads like the clearest expression of that résumé: a beer built by iteration, not reinvention.

That matters in a market where novelty often gets more attention than restraint. ZwanzigZ describes Fulcrum as a big stout loaded with malt and hops, with higher alcohol, a pronounced malt profile and bitterness, and sells it in 12-ounce cans and 4-packs. The brewery also says it expanded into a new production facility in August 2018 and doubled its capacity, and that since opening it has brewed more than 70 different styles. Fulcrum sits inside that larger house portfolio, not as a one-off trophy beer, but as a standard-bearer for what the brewery can do when the recipe and the process stay locked in.

For homebrewers, the lesson is hard to miss. Fulcrum’s success comes from long-term recipe development, a disciplined handle on roast, bitterness and body, and the patience to keep improving the same beer until it lands exactly where judges and drinkers want it. In a competition world crowded with noise, ZwanzigZ proved again that a classic imperial stout, built with care and repeated with consistency, can still stand tallest.