DEBUTS AT #1 IN GABS HOTTEST 100
AUSTRALIAN CRAFT BEERS
Independent NSW brewery, Mountain Culture, has made history this week as the first debut beer to be recognised as #1 in the GABS Hottest 100 Australian Craft Beers list with Mountain Culture’s Status Quo Pale Ale.
Established in the Blue Mountains in October 2019, Mountain Culture’s prestigious GABS win was secured by votes from more than 60,000 Australians.
“To see our flagship beer, Status Quo, win the GABS Hottest 100 in an incredibly competitive list of over 2,100 beers is beyond our wildest dreams,” said co-founder DJ McCready who runs Mountain Culture with his wife Harriet McCready.
“Our team works so hard to make the best quality product possible and the fact we’ve been the #1 rated brewery in Australia on Untappd for the past few years (a global beer rating system with over 8 million users) speaks to that, but to take out GABS win also, against huge breweries that we’ve always admired, is mind blowing.
“We can’t thank people enough for taking the time to vote,” said DJ McCready.
Co-founder Harriet McCready adds: “Status Quo encapsulates so much of what we are about. It was one of our first ever brews on our original brew kit in the early days of our Katoomba brewpub. We called it Status Quo because we wanted to create a beer that set our benchmark for our standard of brewing, so it’s pretty cool that it’s the beer that won!”
Mountain Culture has experienced rapid growth thanks to unrelenting demand. Production capacity has increased in just three years from 60,000 liters per year, to now up to eight million liters with the addition of their new, world-class production facility in Emu Plains. This production volume puts the brewery in the top two percent of independent beer producers in Australia.
“Having a co-founder who is also a brewer means our beer quality has always come before anything else. We always joke that we have the shittest stalls at festivals because our budget goes into better hops and better equipment,” Harriet McCready said. “Our extremely technical process means more control over our product quality and it’s so fulfilling to see the community appreciate the result.”
In addition to a core range of beers, Mountain Culture’s constant stream of limited releases – more than 250 to date – means the team is constantly finessing their technical prowess and experimenting to push the boundaries of beer.
Importing unique yeast strains, using limited release hops, unmodified grain and controlling the pH of the water are just some of the processes they use that are uncommon anywhere outside of the world’s most serious breweries.
Mountain Culture is retailed at Dan Murphy’s, BWS, Coles Liquor Group in all Liquorland stores, First Choice and Vintage Cellars, in 700 independent stores nationwide with a growing list of export countries including New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, China and Hong Kong.