How to Run Your Own Fantasy FoBAB League 2025 + Power Rankings

The 2025 edition of the Festival of Wood and Barrel-Aged Beer is just around the corner. And just as a beer can be enhanced by barrel-aging, a festival can be enhanced by friendly wagering! For the past seven years, we’ve run a Fantasy FoBAB league with some of our beer loving friends – and with a little hasty planning, you can run your own. 

Here’s what you need to know to run your own Fantasy FoBAB league:

• The Simple Concept: Draft breweries who you think have the greatest chance to win medals at FoBAB this year. Each medal win translates to points. The team(s) with the top points win.
• Gather Teams/Competitors: Our league is 10 teams, but this can certainly be done with fewer or more. We draft six breweries each, and that can also be adjusted based on the size of your league. Craig and I have also done a 1-vs.-1 draft for a side wager (choosing 10 breweries each), and that’s a lot of fun too.
• Plan: Consider our Power Rankings (see below) or consult our FoBAB Medal History sheet to plan your desired brewery picks. (As a tip, some breweries post their FoBAB entries to their social media accounts, in case you want a peek into competition entries.)
• Draft: We did this: we randomly generated a draft order using a free online draft generator. We did an email draft amongst 10 team managers, with “awake” hours from 8AM to 10PM. Each manager had a four-hour window to make their selection, and if they did not pick within that window, they would have a brewery auto-drafted for them based on our FoBAB Fantasy Power Rankings. Teams were still welcome to draft outside of the “awake” hours if they chose, but no team would be penalized for not selecting during that time.
• Scoring: The scoring works like this:
  • Gold medal = 3 points
  • Silver medal = 2 points
  • Bronze medal = 1 point
  • Best of Show = 3 additional points
  • Runner-up = 2 additional points
• Prizes: Whatever you want! Put up rare beers, quality fresh 4-packs, or a few bucks. Who cares? It’s fun either way. 

Here’s a Fantasy FoBAB Master Draft Spreadsheet for a 10 team, 6-pick league that you can copy and modify for your own league. 

If you’re playing along at home with your own FoBAB Fantasy Draft for the 2025 season, we the non-experts at ABV Chicago have drafted up our Power Rankings for your draft preparation. 

The list was prepared by two people using their arbitrary opinions and limited experience, so take it for what it’s worth. To be honest, it’s probably a lot more fun if you don’t base your picks off of our silly Power Rankings, as you will definitely disagree with many parts of the list. And since there are 166 participating breweries listed on the FoBAB website, this list overlooks many breweries – so we undoubtedly missed a lot of great stuff. 

The rankings were made based on a combination of several factors:

• Medal history: Using our master spreadsheet of Medal History, we gave higher placement to breweries that have won the most medals, but especially if those medals have come over the last few years. Previous Best of Show and Runner-Up awardees were valued somewhat highly. 
• Multiple locations: For simplifying our Fantasy Draft, each team manager is only allowed to pick one brewery that has multiple locations. As far as we understand, multiple locations means more entries which of course means a higher chance to win. We also didn’t want to bog down the draft with separating out each location. So, they are drafted as a collective. This gives great value to picking More or Firestone Walker or any other multiple-location brewery. (They are marked in the rankings with plus signs representing the number of breweries combined.)
• Style variance: Some breweries enter beer in multiple, distinctly different categories, while others focus primarily on producing beer that fits in just one or two of the categories. Though, the number of categories are pretty split in terms of “sours” vs. “stouts”, which we know is reductive. But certainly, choosing a cider-producer or mead maker has its limitations, as there’s really only one category for those to compete. But the number of competitors is much smaller as well, so choosing a cider or mead producer might be a late-round value pick.
• Reputation: A combination of our subjective experiences and recent wins in other prestigious beer awards, a brewery that has a reputation for excellent barrel-aged beers will be pushed up the list. There are also some breweries that have never medaled but may have gained a strong enough reputation whether through a brewer’s history or through word-of-mouth that might be a fun and risky pick, so we pushed them up as well. 
• Our Subjective Personal Experience: We are not beer judges or experts in any way, but we do drink a lot of beer critically and have been for many years, so I guess we’re allowed to have an opinion. Some breweries may have been pushed up the list because we arbitrarily decided that their barrel-aged beers are better than other breweries’ barrel-aged beers without having tried all breweries’ barrel-aged beers. Makes sense, right?

So we present to you the Power Rankings without further defending our choices. We’re in a time where the smallest unknown brewery can out-barrel the 30-year pros. FoBAB is almost more fun when a list like this one turns out all wrong. I’m raising my tiny taster glass to all of the breweries on (or not on) this list.

ABV Chicago’s Fantasy FoBAB 2025 Power Rankings

1. More Brewing Company+++
2. Sun King Brewery++
3. Off Color Brewing++
4. The Lost Abbey
5. Half Acre Beer Company
6. Firestone Walker+++
7. Revolution Brewing
8. Werk Force Brewing Co.
9. Verboten Brewing and Barrel Project++
10. Cerebral Brewing++
11. Misbeehavin’ Meads
12. Resident Culture Brewing++
13. Superstition Meadery
14. Black Horizon Brewing
15. Idyll Forest Artisan Ales
16. Kros Strain Brewing
17. Mikerphone Brewing
18. Third Eye Brewing Company++
19. Destihl Brewery++
20. Pollyanna Brewing
21. Lupulin Brewing Company
22. Cruz Blanca Brewery
23. Hidden Hand Brewing
24. Forbidden Root++
25. Bottle Logic Brewing
26. Breakside Brewery
27. WeldWerks Brewing Co.
28. Whiskey Hill Brewing
29. Haymarket Brewing++
30. Old Irving Brewing Company
31. Brothership Brewing
32. Sketchbook Brewing
33. Boulevard Brewing++
34. River North Brewery
35. Fair Isle Brewing
36. Imperial Oak Brewing++
37. Lakefront Brewery
38. Foreign Exchange Brewing Co.
39. Noon Whistle Brewing++
40. pFriem Family Brewers
41. Goose Island Beer Company
42. Alter Brewing Company++
43. Right Bee Cider
44. Benchtop Brewing
45. Neuronova Brewing
46. Bubblehouse Brewing
47. White Oak Brewing
48. Xul Beer Company
49. Cahaba Brewing Co.
50. Solemn Oath Brewery
51. other half brewing
52. Milieu Fermentation
53. Maplewood Brewery & Distillery
54. G5 Brewing Company
55. Penrose Brewing
56. New Image Brewing
57. Final Gravity Brewing Company++
58. Ike & Oak Brewing
59. Church Street Brewing Company
60. Pryes Brewing Company
61. Jackie O’s Brewery
62. Westbound & Down Brewing Company
63. Cinderlands Beer Co.
64. Lake Time Brewing and Spirits
65. Derive Brewing
66. False Idol Brewing
67. Barn Town Brewing
68. Middle Brow
69. Begyle Brewing
70. Riverlands Brewing
71. Lakefront Brewery
72. TapRoom Beer Co.
73. Horse Thief Hollow Brewing Co.
74. Forager Brewery
75. Strangebird Beer and Barrel House
76. Ever Grain Brewing Company
77. AleSmith Brewing Company
78. Wild Blossom Meadery
79. Crooked Stave
80. Three Floyds Brewing
81. Streetside Brewery
82. Seedz Brewery
83. Flossmoor Station Restaurant & Brewery
84. Macushla Brewing Co.
85. Homewood Brewing Co.
86. Humble Forager
87. Pipeworks Brewing Co.
88. Wandering Monsters Brewing
89. Tangled Roots Brewing
90. Radiant Beer Co.
91. Masthead Brewing Co.
92. Hailstorm Brewing
93. Confluence Brewing Company
94. Crystal Lake Brewing
95. Fort George Brewery
96. Subculture Artisan Ales
97. Will County Brewing Co.
98. Flipside Brewing
99. Wren House Brewing Company
100. Sway Brewing + Blending