Super Bock and Coimbra's Praxis Each Land a World's-Best Title at the 2026 World Beer Awards
At the 2026 World Beer Awards, Super Bock's Selecção 1927 Japanese Rice Lager was named World's Best Rice Beer, and the Coimbra craft brewery Praxis took World's Best Grape Ale for a beer made with Dão grapes. Both are top honours within their style categories.
Two Portuguese brewers — one the country's biggest industrial name, the other a small craft outfit in Coimbra — have each taken a top prize at this year's World Beer Awards, the international competition run out of the United Kingdom that judges beers blind, style category by style category. The results, announced in mid-August, handed Portugal two of the awards' coveted "World's Best" titles, according to the newspaper Observador and other Portuguese coverage.
The heavyweight winner was Super Bock, whose Selecção 1927 ("1927 Selection") line — the premium range named for the brand's founding-registration year — took the title of World's Best Rice Beer with its Japanese Rice Lager, a lager brewed with rice. The same beer also collected a Gold medal and was named Portugal's Country Winner. Super Bock Group, based at Leça do Balio in greater Porto, is Portugal's largest brewer, and its haul did not stop there: the Selecção 1927 Czech Golden Lager earned a second Gold and Country Winner, the Munich Dunkel a Silver for the third year running, and the Bavaria Weiss a Bronze.
The other world title went to a far smaller producer. Praxis, a craft microbrewery (cervejeira artesanal) from Coimbra in central Portugal, was named World's Best Grape Ale for a beer made in partnership with the Portuguese winemaker Carlos Lucas. Its Grape Ale is built around Encruzado, a white grape from the Dão wine region, and belongs to a hybrid style that folds grape must into the brewing process, pulling beer closer to the world of wine. Portuguese reports describe Praxis as the most-decorated national brewery of the 2026 edition, crediting it with nine medals in all: five Country Winner titles — for the Grape Ale, Onyx, Belgian Triple, Glutbeer and Topázio — plus two Silvers and two Bronzes.
It is worth being precise about what "world's best" means here. The World Beer Awards judge entries within defined style categories, and a "World's Best" title is the top honour within a category — above the Country Winner and the Gold, Silver and Bronze tiers — rather than a single crown for the finest beer on the planet. Portugal, in other words, produced the judges' favourite rice beer and their favourite grape ale, not an outright global champion. That distinction takes nothing away from the achievement, but it is the accurate frame.
Nor is this entirely new ground for Portuguese brewing. Super Bock's Selecção 1927 Japanese Rice Lager had already been named World's Best in the rice-beer niche at the 2021 edition of the same awards, and was Portugal's Country Winner in the category in 2023 before slipping to a Silver in 2025 — so the 2026 world title reads as a return to the top rather than a debut. Between a corporate brewer refining a Japanese-inspired lager and a Coimbra microbrewery blending beer with Dão grapes, the two wins sketch the range of a Portuguese beer scene that has quietly grown more ambitious, and that is increasingly being noticed beyond its borders.
