Mountain Culture Beer Co has done it again!
The Katoomba brewery has won the GABS (Great Australasian Beer SpecTAPular) Hottest 100 Craft Beer poll for a second consecutive year, with its Status Quo Pale Ale.
"To take it home for the second year in a row, second year and in the competition, it's unreal," said head brewer and co-owner DJ McCready.
"I thought this year I would be less stressed, but when it started coming out it was the exact same feeling.
"All the things rattling around in my head of like, 'did we just win last year because we were the underdog?' and 'it was the first year and everybody rallied behind us' and 'was it a fluke?' ... 'did we actually do a good job this year' and 'are people really enjoying the beer?'"
"It's definitely still just as good of a feeling as the first year. It's been awesome."
There were 436 of Australia's best craft breweries entered in the poll, with 1,877 different beers attracting votes.
After the tens of thousands of votes had been counted, Status Quo was crowned Australia's favourite craft beer.
It wasn't the only brew from Mountain Culture to make the countdown, as Australia's top rated brewery on Untappd saw three more beers make it into the top 50.
The collaboration with US brewery Sierra Nevada, the Summer Pale Ale, reached 46, the limited release Be Kind Rewind came in at 41 and another core range beer, the Cult IPA, made it to 22.
Mr McCready said it was incredible seeing all four beers make the countdown.
"Especially the collab we did with Sierra Nevada. We only pushed that one through independent retailers and I think it speaks a lot to the craft beer community still really being behind this poll," he said.
"I've heard a lot of negative kind of comments out there about GABS Hottest 100, it's just a voting competition for like Dan Murphy's and Liquorland and if you're not in those channels you don't do well on it.
"But the fact that was a limited release, it was just only stocked through independent retailers, I think it just speaks to the competition still still being dominated by people who are actually interested in craft beers."
Mr McCready and his team had a good time celebrating the win.
"When I think of what we do in a nutshell, if I had one product to hand to people to say 'this is what Mountain Culture is', it's Status Quo," he said.
"Seeing the kind of humble beginnings of where we started out and realising that we built this small team off of this shoe string, and here we are taking the top spot from breweries that are multi nationally owned.
To signify the release, Mountain Culture have decided to launch a can of APL strapped to a model rocket into the atmosphere on Saturday.
"And to have done that being based out of Katoomba is pretty unreal. I think a lot of it is also the Blue Mountains rallying behind us. The community up there and this giant fan group that we have, that's always just been so good to us."
A new brew ready to take off
After starting the week with the Hottest 100 win, Mr McCready and his team now shift their focus to one of the biggest releases in the breweries history.
"We're launching a rocket next weekend," he said.
Mountain Culture will be releasing its newest core range product on Saturday, APL - Australian Pale Lager.
"It's been a beer that we've been tinkering away on for the last three years and we've actually gotten to the point, scale wise, to where we can really commit to a beer like this," he said. "It's incredibly drinkable.
"The last three, four years, we focused on big experience kind of beers with a lot of flavour. Whereas the APL we designed more for high drinkability.
"It's really thirst quenching, clean, crisp beer, so it's almost going to be like, the yin to the yang of Status Quo. It's a very easy drinking kind of beer.
To signify the release, Mountain Culture have decided to launch a can of APL strapped to a model rocket into the atmosphere on Saturday.
The brewery always aims to produce better and higher quality beer, so all of its investments go towards new equipment, new staff to do more and increase quality.
"So it usually leaves the marketing team with a bare bones budget," said Mr McCready.
"So we're like, 'how do we launch a new brand?', we haven't brought anything into our core range in years, this is a big deal for us.
"We spent so much time honing in on it, getting it right, really putting a big stake behind and ... there's no money in the budget.
"So [our marketing team] are like, 'why don't we just build a rocket and we'll launch the brand'. That's basically where we've come to and we'll see if [the rocket] gets off the ground, but I definitely know that APL is going to take off."
The Mountain Culture team are excited to be launching their new beer especially off the back of their Hottest 100 victory.
"Hopefully we'll see [APL] up there in the running next year."