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These 2 Mass. breweries just made the top 4 on a list of the best worldwide

A Trillium beer.JC Tetreault/Trillium

A popular beer-rating website has released its latest list of the top 100 brewers in the world — and two of the top four spots were claimed by Massachusetts breweries.

RateBeer dropped their ranking on Monday, naming Trillium and Tree House the third and fourth best breweries on the planet in 2019. The top spot was claimed by Vermont’s Hill Farmstead Brewery, while second place went to Side Project Brewing in Missouri.

Jack’s Abby in Framingham also made the list at No. 29. Other breweries from around New England — including Maine Beer Company (26) and Allagash (34) — were also named on the ranking.

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“New England, and Massachusetts especially, is an important and well-developed world region for craft beer appreciation,” RateBeer cofounder Joe Tucker said in an e-mail to the Globe. The New England breweries on the list “have matured into world class destination breweries and attract our site’s members locally and from around the world.”

The rankings “are solely based on calculations of ratings provided by our worldwide community reviewers,” Tucker said. The awards are released annually and tallied from millions of reviews posted by the site’s users.

This year’s awards take into account ratings from the last four years, with an emphasis on last year’s performance, according to an explanation on the website.

In the Massachusetts section of RateBeer’s subregion list, the best beer award went to Tree House’s Bbbrighttt - Citra, and best brewer went to Trillium. RateBeer also named winners by state for best brewpub (Cambridge Brewing Company), best restaurant (Row 34), best brewer tap room (Tree House), best bottle shop (Julio’s), best grocer (Fort Point Market), and best bar (Lord Hobo).

Trillium has long been a darling of Boston’s craft beer scene, growing from a small Fort Point husband-and-wife-owned startup to a brewery that helped spur Boston’s open-air beer garden craze after it opened on the Rose Kennedy Greenway in 2017. It opened a brewery and taproom in Canton in 2015, and launched a new brewery/restaurant in Fort Point in 2018, as well as a new tap room in the Fenway area, just outside the popular Time Out Market food hall, this past fall. (Of course, Trillium has not been without its growing pains: The brewery made changes to its employee pay structure after a backlash over wage cuts came to light in 2018.)

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Meanwhile, Tree House has won national renown, primarily for its New England India pale ales — the hazy, fruity style that the brewery helped pioneer.

But actually tasting Tree House’s beer remains a bit of a chore: With very few exceptions, people hoping to try their beer must travel to the brewery’s massive compound in Charlton, about 55 miles west of Boston. And visiting on a busy Saturday can mean waiting in line for an hour or more to buy beer to take home.


Jaclyn Reiss can be reached at jaclyn.reiss@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JaclynReiss