Mountain Culture
Location: Katoomba, Blue Mountains NSW, Australia
Established: 2019
Speciality: Top drawer, fresh hazy beers, Australia's best rated brewery.
From the brewery:
In 2019 DJ and Harriet McCready embarked on transforming a dilapidated building into the first brewpub in the Blue Mountains.
When the pandemic took hold just months after Mountain Culture Beer Co. was launched by husband and wife, Harriet and DJ McCready, they were forced to hit the reset button on their Blue Mountains brewery and veer into an online business. The success of their pivot was swift and staggering. But in order to keep up with demand, by the end of 2020, Mountain Culture had increased the capability of its brewery from 60,000 litres of beer per year to half-a-million litres.
DJ, from North Carolina, won acclaim at Mona Vale’s Modus Operandi Brewing (which won many industry awards during his tenure) and at Colorado’s Oskar Blues brewery before that.
Now he wants to take the craft to another level.
He’s doing that by working with water, which is where reverse osmosis comes in. “What it does is strips our water back to base level. It removes all the minerality, the chlorine, the fluoride, and brings the water back to absolute base. That allows us to build the water profile we want to then build each beer individually,” he explains. “We can match the water profile in the Czech Republic or Ireland. Beyond matching we can treat our brewing water as another ingredient.”
