The best beer’s from here The people’s choice: Mountain Culture Beer Co’s big win in national competition

CASSIDY PEARCE

Mountain Culture Beer Co, which recently opened up a brewery in Emu Plains, has taken out the GABS Hottest 100 Craft Beer people’s choice poll with its Status Quo Pale Ale.

Co-owner of Mountain Culture, DJ McCready, started his brewing journey at the tender age of 23, volunteering at a brewery in his home town of Asheville, North Carolina.

When he first moved to Australia, McCready recalls falling in love with his wife, Harriet, and with the Blue Mountains, where they opened up what was supposed to be a small brew pub, aimed both at the local community and to weekend travellers.

Bushfires in 2019 and COVID lockdowns in the two years that followed forced them to get creative. Through opting to can their beer and operate primarily as an e-commerce business, Mountain Culture skyrocketed, making their beer known around Australia and around the world.

For McCready, this can be described as nothing else but a whirlwind.

“It started off and it was just Harriet and I and maybe five or six other staff, most of which are still here with us now, and now we’ve grown to about 75 employees company-wide,” he said.

“The growth has just been insane, but really, we’ve just stuck to what’s mattered to us from the beginning, which is product quality.”

With the results of this year’s poll released over the weekend, it’s become apparent that he isn’t the only one who thinks so, with Mountain Culture Beer Co’s Status Quo Pale Ale named the new GABS Hottest 100 Champion of 2022, out of 311 breweries in the poll and a whopping 2140 different beers which attracted votes.

This is the first year Mountain Culture Beer Co has entered into the competition, with McCready citing a lack of readiness in the past. Despite knowing Status Quo has developed quite the fan base, he said expectations remained low.

“It was definitely one of those things where, I don’t think I’ve ever been more stressed in my entire life,” he said.

“We’re still such a young brand, and when I thought about who we would be lined up next to, knowing the backing that those companies have, and the reach, and that some of them are owned by multi-nationals with endless budgets or by influencers with millions and millions of followers, I’m sitting here with our team, and we just had no idea how we were going to go.”

As the poll results crept towards number one, it’s no secret the team at Mountain Culture were filled with excitement – though McCready said he had his reservations until he heard the news himself.

“We got to the point where there were only five beers left, and everybody was like ‘We‘re making it’, ‘We’re getting there!’, and I was like, ‘Guys, calm down, we probably didn’t make list!’,” he said.

“The fact that we took out the top spot, I’m still having a hard time processing it.”

Now with another number one under his belt, having taken out the number one brewery on Untappd for the past few years, McCready is now setting his sights on distribution.

“When I was reading a lot of comments about the win, there were some that were like, ‘Who the hell are these guys?’, but that’s so exciting to me, because now I want to get Status Quo into more hands,” he said.