Best in Beer 2024

This is a go-to recipe for the winter holidays. It’s easy to brew and makes use of cranberries for some seasonal flavor. It also makes a tasty base for experimenting with Renée and various infusions, whether at holiday festivities or just messing around in the kitchen at home.

Infusing beer with fruit and other flavors between the tap and the glass isn’t just a relic of a time when craft beer was less mainstream—and, often, more fun. It’s also something you can do at home, today. Ready to get acquainted?

Inspired by the festive, seasonal releases from Düsseldorf’s altbier breweries, this sticke recipe takes what’s great about altbier and kicks it up a notch for special occasions.

From our Love Handles files on beer bars we love: In Redmond, Oregon, Jersey Boys has 50 taps of local and regional craft beers—and it wants you to know that New Jersey–style pizza is a thing.

This style-spanning yearly celebration of the harvest is brewed in many ways and in many places—but the best place in the world to appreciate fresh-hopped beers is the Pacific Northwest.

What do changes in the beer market and drinking habits portend for one of the most creative and influential beer-producing countries? These data points from the Belgian Brewers industry group provide an eye-opening glimpse.

The old tech of the oak barrel still works beautifully in the brewery—but it does need a nice, solid thwack with the mallet now and then. Brewers are already janitors, plumbers, and microbiologists, among other things. Might as well add coopers to the list.

One of the most industrialized parts of Germany has a surprising farmhouse brewing tradition, but information about it is scarce. Based on interviews with surviving farmhouse brewers, conducted in the 1950s by the Folklore Commission of Westphalia, here’s our attempt at a recipe. We also include some variations in the notes below.

Farmhouse brewing was once common across much of Europe, though documentation can be scarce. Here’s what we know about a surprising and little-known rural brewing tradition in northwest Germany.

From our Love Handles files on the world’s great beer bars: This shop and tasting room in Brooklyn, New York, offers deep knowledge and a place to chill while exploring the magic of great beer.

From the team at Silver Reef in St. George, Utah, here’s a homebrew-scale recipe for the smoked lager that won gold at the 2024 World Beer Cup.

Brewed on the edge of the Mojave in St. George, Utah, Silver Reef’s Más Fuego Rauchbier won gold at the World Beer Cup last year. Here’s what goes into the elegant smoked beer that’s gained a following among brewers and other beer-savvy visitors to Las Vegas.

Writer David Jesudason and brewer Nidhi Sharma share this homebrew-scale recipe based on an Indian-spiced pale ale they brewed together at London’s Meantime. It features “luminescent” turmeric as well as coriander, bay leaves, and black pepper.

This plant from the ginger family can add subtle spice to your beer—or turn it so gold that it could have been brewed at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.

From our Love Handles files on the world’s great beer bars: In south St. Louis, this small pub focuses on bottom-fermented beauties, from perfect Czech-style pours to ice-cold High Life.

The brewmaster at Cleveland’s Fat Head’s—best known for their award-winning IPAs—shares a six-pack inspired by German and Belgian brewing traditions, with beers that speak to flavor, technique, and the experiences that have shaped his own approach to brewing.

Topher Boehm, cofounder and brewer at Wildflower in Marrickville, Australia, shares this recipe for their low-strength yet satisfying ale—an ideal framework for conveying a sense of place via local malt and a foraged house fermentation culture.

With local malt and a mixed fermentation culture foraged and harvested from native Australian flowers, Wildflower is focused on producing satisfying table beers with a true sense of place. Cofounder and brewer Topher Boehm explains their approach.

Josh Weikert prowled his local produce aisle following a simple principle: Buy what looks best, and go with the freshest fruit you can get. That led him to guava and passion fruit, a dynamic for this Brazilian-inspired tart fruit beer.

From Dádiva brewery in São Paulo with BRLO in Berlin, this German-Brazilian take on the Catharina sour combines fresh mango and cherry-like acerola for bright, tropical fruit flavors.

Brazil’s take on tart fruit beer—the Catharina sour—has its own name and moves, but brewers anywhere can follow the steps.

Checking in at just 3.2 percent ABV, Bourgeois Daydreams is the delicate, aromatic table beer at Chicago’s saison-focused Is/Was Brewing. Cofounder and brewer Mike Schallau describes it as “a balance of rustic grains, fresh-hop character, yeast esters, and a sprinkle of Brett funk.”

Simple yet dazzling, farmhouse-inspired beers on the lower end of the ABV spectrum present brewers—and drinkers—with an enthralling riddle.

From Fifth Street Brewpub in Dayton, Ohio, this farmhouse ale gets a dose of cacao pulp at packaging, showcasing the fruit’s sweetness and tropical character while amplifying similar notes from the strain of Brettanomyces.

From the historic heart of Amsterdam, De Bekeerde Suster brewer Jason Pellett shares this recipe for a hop-forward pale ale that makes use of cacao’s fruity pulp (and a few of the nibs).

Cacao isn’t just for chocolate beers—around those nibs is a whole fruit with its own bright and unexpected flavors. Largely unknown outside tropical climates, those flavors present some unique possibilities for beer.

From Belgium to Harlem and around the world, with deep dives into barleywine and barrel aging, here are some recent titles worth adding to the brewery bookshelf.

From hop selection to dry hops, finishing gravity, and mouthfeel, Other Half cofounder and brewmaster Sam Richardson isolates the key elements of their popular, year-round imperial hazy IPA.

Big yet simple in its construction, this is a showcase of what clean ethanol flavors can add to a beer. Apple-like alcohols meld with the hop aroma and bready grist to yield a simple yet dangerous lager that’s anything but boring.

This Belgian-style amber ale should serve as a fine vehicle for any “concrete” sugar such as panela, piloncillo, rapadura, tapa de dulce, or jaggery.

Once derided as cheap adjuncts, sugars have become useful, flavorful tools for today’s creative brewers.

Have those countertop, push-button homebrew machines gotten any better over the years? Let’s find out.

We asked five of the brewers behind our Best 20 Beers in 2023 to share their own favorites from 2024.

The New York City–based writer, tarot enthusiast, author of the Hugging the Bar newsletter, and noted metalhead shares her beery high points from the past year.

One of the most influential and incisive voices in beer, the force behind Dontdrinkbeer and the Malt Couture podcast, has been leaning into nonalcoholic beer over the past year as he battles cancer. Here are his greatest hits.

Pubs, bars, and cafés are crucial to the experience and community of craft beer and a vital link between maker and consumer. Here are your 20 favorites in 2024.

Our own Hops Insider and the author of numerous books on brewing shares his highlights from the past year.

Our Bangkok-based executive editor selects top-of-mind picks and thoughts based on his travels in the past year.

Here are the best cities in the United States and around the world for drinking great beer in 2024—according to you, our readers.