Mountain Culture take out the top spot in Hottest 100 Craft Beer countdown

Founded in 2019, originally as a brewpub, the now top rated brewery in Australia on Untappd, entered into the Hottest 100 for the first time this year and managed to be crowned champion.

GABS [Great Australasian Beer SpecTAPular ] Hottest 100 is a people's choice poll that reveals the trends, brands and breweries shaping the local craft beer landscape.

This year more than 60,000 people registered to vote, on 2,140 different beers from 311 breweries across the country. Status Quo was victorious.

Co-founded and run by husband and wife team, DJ and Harriet McCready, Mountain Culture saw numerous entries into the Hottest 100 with its Cult IPA coming in at 15 iBe Kind Rewind NEIPA snagging 36, collaboration with Balter Brewing, Bucket Full Of Nothin', voted in at 40.

Mr McCready said he couldn't be more happy with the brewery's success in the Hottest 100.

"Given this is the first year that we've entered GABS hottest 100, I had no idea if we were going to make the list or come 50 or who knows where," he said.

"The whole day just felt like a real whirlwind of emotion and stress and excitement. It's crazy.

"To take out the number one spot was pretty unreal for us."

Much of the success of Mountain Culture can be put down to its team's concentration on making the best beers they can.

Mr McCready said they have always built the brand off the quality of the beer - something they have tried to maintain throughout the breweries rapid growth.

"We just kept expanding and really this all seems to be off the quality of the beer we're producing," he said. "The larger we get, the more we just keep investing back into making it better and better.

"When I look at other brands ... and the amount of money that they spend on [their] marketing budget compared to us, where ours is all just 'is this gonna make the beer tastes better?' ... all of the spend just goes to beer quality.

"That's just been the thing that we've used to really steer the company from day one and it still seems to be working now."

The creation of Status Quo was an experiment for Mountain Culture. They wanted to take the techniques and skills learned from brewing New England IPAs and put it into something that encapsulated the style, but was more sessionable [more suitable for drinking over an extended period].

Mr McCready said he found the New England IPA style to be interesting, because it's technically a very hard recipe to achieve.

"There's a lot of different factors involved in it," he said. You have to have a really deep understanding of water chemistry, of using different yeast strains and having them interact with hops at different times. You have to understand a lot of how to build different protein bills in your grain.

"New England IPAs are a very big beer. It's like a bit of an experience where you might have one or two of them, but after that, it's almost palate overload ... [but with] Status Quo people could come to the brew pub and enjoy several [of them], but not fall off their barstool."

"Status Quo for us was just a way that we could say we were encapsulating everything, we're using all of these different brewing techniques that we've honed in on.

"We're using a deep understanding of water chemistry and manipulating minerality in the water to achieve this really softness, but we're able to put it into a package that's much more approachable."

"If I was to put one can in front of people and say 'Hey, this what Mountain Culture is in a can', it would be Status Quo."

Mountain Culture has a second outlet in Emu Plains at the bottom of the Mountains.