European Beer Star (EBS) is the world’s largest, most prestigious competition for European-style beers. Think classic styles from some of the oldest beer cultures in the world: England, Belgium, Germany, and the Czech Republic. This competition, though, is open to brewers from around the world. Who’s to say that a brewery from a non-traditional beer country can’t win gold in categories for some of the most European of beers? It happens quite often, actually, and we hope Japanese breweries will take the challenge. Many have done well in the past.

This year’s competition features seventy-two categories. It’s actually not all classics, though. In an effort to remain interesting and updated, EBS also offers categories like “Session Beer”, “New-Style Indian Pale Ale”, “International-Style Lager”, and three non-alcoholic beer categories. There’s even a new category called “Free-style Beer”. Given some of the creativity we’ve seen in Japan using native ingredients, or things like sake-beer hybrids, we think Japan has plenty of opportunity to shine in this one. Of course, Japanese craft brewers have generally been committed to brewing classic European styles as well–consider all those alts, pilsners, hefeweizens, dark ales and blond ales you see. There are at least a handful of categories for every brewery in Japan out there.

The competition itself is straightforward. Each category receives gold, silver, and bronze awards, though judges may refrain from awarding any medals if they think no entries are up to standard. Judging is conducted according to blind tasting and analysis against clear category descriptions listed on the EBS website.