Stroud Brewery is celebrating after winning a top award in the brewing industry’s biggest independent national beer competition.

Its organic lager, Light Organic Lager (aka LOL), received the gold medal in the Best Bottle/Can Session Lager category beating other competitors from around the UK.

This means the Brewery’s beers and lagers have won a total of 9 awards in the past year. It has also just reached the finals of the C2S Business Awards for its work in reducing the brewery’s impact on the environment.

The annual SIBA Independent Beer Awards are organised by the Society of Independent Brewers and Associates and this year’s winners were announced at BeerX, the UK’s biggest beer and brewing trade event which took place at the Exhibition Centre in Liverpool.

This year was the biggest ever, attracting over 3,000 delegates to a packed conference for talks, seminars, tasting sessions, and of course the beer awards which name the very best of the best in the independent beer industry.

LOL had won the Best Bottle/Can Session Lager category at SIBA’s Wales & West Regional heats last summer and then went forward to these national finals.

Greg Pilley, founder & MD of Stroud Brewery, and his brewing team are over the moon.

He said: “We’re so thrilled as a small local, craft brewery to have won this national recognition, and showcasing that organic ingredients can be the basis of great tasting beers. We’re on a mission to persuade the whole of the brewing trade to embrace sustainability, to have ‘for-the-planet beer’ in every pub.”

Greg continued “but a vital part of achieving this is proving that products made sustainably are as good as those made ‘conventionally’. We’ve been using 100% organic ingredients in our beers since the early days of the Brewery at a time when this was virtually unheard of and we were viewed with scepticism. It’s heartening to see how attitudes have changed 180 degrees since then and that the quality of organic food and drink can be award-winning.”

Just last week, the Brewery reached the finals of the C2S Business Awards in the Sustainability category. C2S is one of the South West’s leading business support and networking organisations and its annual awards celebrate the movers and shakers in the business world. The winners will be announced on July 12.