Mountain Culture

If Mountain Culture Beer Co was in Marrickville, you’d already know about it. The Katoomba brewery, which opened late last year, is one of the most ambitious breweries ever to open in Australia. Just looking at the beers on offer may not tell that story, but the presence of a reverse-osmosis filter should (more on that later).

The brewery is run by husband-and-wife duo DJ and Harriet McCready. DJ, who hails from North Carolina in the US, 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. Here, he wants to take the craft to another level.

He’s doing that by working with water, which is where that filter 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.”