445: The Best in Beer 2025 Special, Featuring the Stories Behind the Picks

It’s one of the most anticipated episodes of the year—our annual peek behind the scenes of the Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine™ Best in Beer issue, as editorial director Jamie Bogner and executive editor Joe Stange share perspectives on the beers we’ve named as our best 20 of 2025—plus, they reveal the results of the annual Readers’ Choice poll.

Throughout the year, we taste thousands of beers submitted to the magazine for review; our blind-review panel narrows them down further, finding top scorers in various styles for each issue of the magazine; and finally, we convene for a final round of blind tasting to narrow it down to 20 standouts of great character and quality—beers that inevitably represent this moment in beer.

In this episode, we pull back the curtain to share some of the thinking (and tasting) behind the decisions, and we run through your Readers’ Choice picks for best beers of the year, best breweries, best beer cities, best beer bars, and more.

This episode is brought to you by:

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