The 2026 Perth Royal Food Awards – Beer attracted more than 482 entries from 46 breweries. Competing across 5 special trophy, 17 trophy, and 79 different medal categories.
Lucky Bay Brewing took home 2 trophies including Best Hybrid/Specialty Packaged for their Barley Chardonay and the special trophy for Champion Small Brewery, proudly sponsored by HPA. If that wasn’t enough, they also took home 19 medals, including 7 golds in multiple categories. After giving them some time to celebrate their awards, we got in touch with owners Nigel Metz and Robyn Cail to congratulate them and ask a few questions about their beers.
Q: Congrats on your recent success at the 2026 Perth Royal Food Awards – Beer. You went home with the trophy for Best Hybrid/Specialty Packaged and a special trophy for Champion Small Brewery. What does this recognition mean to you?
A: (Nigel Metz) Because Champion Brewery is judged over a combination of your best-scoring beers, to win Champion Brewery is a really great thing for us. It endorses the work that our brew team does in making consistent beers across our whole range. It really shows that the care and attention they’ve put in has paid off. We’re really grateful for that, because it’s the backbone of our business and who we are. We make good beer from the grain we grow in our region
Q: You also earned a slew of medals, including 7 gold, 4 silver and 8 bronze. What’s the secret to making award-winning beers across multiple categories?
A: (Nigel Metz) For me, the secret to consistent beer is attention to detail throughout the whole process. And for award-winning beer, obviously you pick your ingredients carefully — but choose wisely. Don’t try to put everything into it. Really focus on the beer and let the ingredients be the spotlight. From there, it’s about consistency in production, care, and repeatability in your process. Our Head Brewer Rob’s work with quality control and his team has really paid off there, and we’re very grateful for that. It gives us confidence that our production team is consistently producing good-quality beer.
Q: Of all your beers that medalled, which 3 mean the most and why?
A: (Nigel Metz) One beer that means a lot to me is the Barley Chardonnay. The idea came from Jack on our brew team — combining wine-like flavours while still using grain as the base. It became a really interesting hybrid project that we developed with the help of Galafrey Wines and their barrels, alongside our local grain. It’s a uniquely local story around that product. It’s also fantastic to receive a gold medal for our NZ Juicy. In craft beer, having a hoppy-style beer awarded is a real endorsement of the brew team’s ability to make a great hoppy beer.
The Honey Sour is another special one. It’s a beer we’ve been working on for a number of years, but it’s really found its place now. We’ve refined it, much to the delight of our local honey producer, who insists we should be making a lot more of it. It’s great to have that local resource. It’s actually the only beer where we don’t use local grain — instead, we use Esperance honey, combined with corn from the Ord River region. That’s what makes it gluten free.
Then to have gold medal awards spread across beers like Thistle Cove amber ale (low alcohol), Black Jack porter and The Mountaineer barrel aged barley wine — which are more malt-driven and even low-alcohol styles — shows the breadth of flavour profiles we’re producing.
Q: On the journey from homebrewer to award-winning craft brewery, what’s the biggest milestone you’ve celebrated?
A: (Nigel Metz) Being a Champion Brewery is definitely one of our biggest milestones in beer production. And we’ve now won it twice – first in 2021 and now again in 2026, which gives us a real sense of pride in producing good-quality beer.
We never started out as home brewers. We came more from environmental and agricultural science backgrounds. But we were able to find brewing expertise and bring those people into the team. Our neighbour was a home brewer, and Rob was a home brewer too. Bringing together that expertise and passion with our desire to showcase local ingredients has been really satisfying. Working with Rob, Jack, Katie, and the production team, alongside our vision of creating beer with ingredients that focus on distinct flavour profiles — that’s been incredibly rewarding. Those flavours are uniquely linked to where we’re from: Esperance, in the southeast of Western Australia.
Q: Do you have a favourite Aussie hop?
A: (Rob Halford) Eclipse is definitely a favourite amongst the team it just goes so well into anything requiring bit of extra punch, we feel it complements other hops in its category really well.
A personal favourite of mine is Enigma, it’s hard to put into words, but there is something about it that I really like. I just feel it has a unique flavour profile that stands out amongst the rest.
Q: Talk us through The Local and The Southerly. We hear you’re sourcing hops from right around the corner in Esperance! What beer styles are they and which hop varieties are you using?
A: (Rob Halford) The Southerly we make as a hoppy lager (~4%), we try to give the hops a chance to be the main focal point for the beer. It’s an interesting beer to make as the seasonal variety makes the beer unique from year to year. This is now the 6th year that we have created The Southerly, Aaron from Great Southern Hops picks them and drives them over from Albany as soon as possible. We try to line everything up so once he arrives, they are basically thrown straight into the whirlpool. It’s a big job to get them in as fresh as possible as we are just so far from everyone.
The Local on the other hand we make as a bit of a stronger pale ale (~5%), this beer is a bit easier as the hops don’t have to travel such a large distance, Kevin Young has a hobby hop farm here in Esperance and has been slowly building up over the last couple of years. It’s been great to see the quality and yield increase as the hop plants mature.
In terms of the varieties used they both contain Beedelup and Victoria, the reason behind this being they tend to be the varieties that thrive in the conditions in Esperance and Albany. This results in the best flavour and aroma profile for us as brewers and also yield for the farmer.
A: (Nigel Metz) The south coast is cooler and more temperate, and we’re fortunate to have opportunities within the Great Southern and South Coast regions.
Firstly, there’s Aaron at Great Southern Hops, just out of Albany. He has an absolute passion for growing hops in a climate that’s a little different from where hops traditionally come from. There are challenges in that, but he’s done great work breaking ground with hop production in our region. Then, closer to home in Esperance, there’s Kevin Young — a retired plant breeder. Kevin has a wealth of agronomic experience in crop production that’s nationally, if not internationally, recognised in wheat and barley breeding. As a retirement project, he’s crossing hops and experimenting with small-scale production. It’ll never be massive production, but it’s uniquely local and backed by some of the sharpest agronomy knowledge in Australia. Kevin’s been a huge supporter of Lucky Bay Brewing and of the region’s grain production. One of the beers we produce from that collaboration is called The Local — and you don’t get much more local than Kevin Young.
The hops we grow in our region aren’t necessarily the same varieties that thrive elsewhere. Aaron and Kevin have both worked on bridging that gap — figuring out which hop varieties work in our environment and what agronomic changes are needed to make them productive. At the same time, we’ve been developing the flavour profiles. Over the last three years, we’ve made some really good improvements in those beers.
