Key Takeaways
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The GABS Hottest 100 is the country's biggest people's choice beer poll. Anyone can vote, the winners are decided by drinkers rather than a panel of judges, and topping it is about as close as you can get to being crowned the best beer in Australia.
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GABS started as a single festival day in 2011 and grew into a national institution. The Hottest 100 countdown, born even earlier at a St Kilda pub, is now its headline event every January.
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Mountain Culture's Status Quo has topped the GABS Hottest 100 four years running, from 2022 to 2025, the first beer in the poll's history to go back to back to back to back.
Every January, a certain kind of Australian sits refreshing the same web page, waiting to find out which beer the country has voted its favourite. Not the critics. Not a panel of judges with clipboards. The drinkers themselves.
That countdown is the GABS Hottest 100, and it has quietly become one of the most-watched days on the local beer calendar. So before the next one rolls around, it is worth looking back at where GABS came from, how the poll turned into the unofficial vote for the best beer in Australia, and how a small brewery in the Blue Mountains ended up owning the number one spot.
So what exactly is GABS?
GABS stands for the Great Australasian Beer SpecTAPular, and it began life as a one-day festival. The first event ran in 2011, dreamed up by Steve Jeffares and Guy Greenstone, the pair behind the Local Taphouse bars in Melbourne and Sydney. They hoped a handful of brewers might get involved. Twenty-two turned up, each pouring a beer made especially for the day.
It grew quickly. Within a few years the festival had moved into Melbourne's Royal Exhibition Building, added a Sydney leg, and was pulling tens of thousands of drinkers through the doors to try one-off beers they could not get anywhere else. Hundreds of breweries now take part, and today GABS is regularly named among the best craft beer festivals in the world, a highlight of the Australian brewing calendar.
But for most people, the festival is only half the story. The other half is the poll.
The GABS Hottest 100, explained
The GABS Hottest 100 is a countdown of the nation's favourite craft beers, voted for by the public and revealed one beer at a time. It runs in late January, and it has become the moment the Australian beer scene stops to see how the year's tastes actually shook out.
Where the poll came from
The countdown is actually older than the festival that now runs it. It started back in 2008 at the Local Taphouse as the Hottest 100 Australian Craft Beers, a cheeky beer-world answer to Triple J's music countdown. Same founders, same January timing, so when GABS grew into a national brand the poll came along with it and became the GABS Hottest 100 we know today.
How the vote actually works
There are no judges and no tasting panel, just voters. Craft beer drinkers submit their own list of favourites, the votes get tallied, and the beers with the most support climb the list. In recent years hundreds of brewers and well over a thousand different beers have picked up votes, with the overall tally running into the tens of thousands.
That is what gives the result its weight. Winning a medal at a beer awards show is a judgement on quality. Topping the GABS Hottest 100 is a popular vote, a snapshot of Australian beer at its best, which is exactly why so many people treat the number one beer as the best beer in Australia for that year.
Looking back at the beers that shaped the poll
Scroll through the old results and you get a tidy history of how Australian beer, and Australian palates, have changed.
The early countdowns leaned hard on big, bitter West Coast IPAs and punchy pale ales, the craft beer that first pulled drinkers away from mainstream lager and the draught tap. Stone & Wood's Pacific Ale was a long-time favourite, and as the years rolled on, crisp XPAs and hop-forward pales from brewers around the country, South Australia to Queensland, took over the pointy end of the list. Balter's XPA has been a near-permanent fixture near the top, taking second place more than once, while festival wild cards from the likes of Melbourne's Moon Dog kept the countdown interesting.
Then the hazies arrived. Soft, juicy and tropical, far less bitter than the beers before them, with the malt kept in the background and a dry, drinkable finish. The hazy pale ale rewrote what a crowd-pleasing beer could taste like, and that is roughly where our part of the story begins.
What it takes to top the poll
There is a pattern to the beers that win. They are almost always approachable, hop-forward pale ales and XPAs, the kind of beer you happily drink a few of, rather than a rare, one-off release.
Availability matters too. The breweries near the top tend to can their beer and get it into fridges right across Australia, so more drinkers can find it and vote for it. And consistency counts, because a beer that tastes the same every single time is the one people come back to, year after year.
Mountain Culture's GABS story
From a Katoomba brewpub
Mountain Culture opened its doors in 2019 in Katoomba, up in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, as a small brewpub with outsized ambitions and a brewing kit to match. It did not take long to get noticed. Barely a year in, it was named Australia's Best New Brewery.
The beer that changed everything was Status Quo, a 5.2% hazy pale ale, all passionfruit and citrus and very little of the harsh bitterness that used to define hoppy beer. It became a flagship the moment people tasted it.
The four-peat that made history
In 2022, Mountain Culture's Status Quo topped the GABS Hottest 100 for the first time. Then it did it again in 2023. And in 2024. And in 2025.
Four number ones in a row is something no beer had ever managed. When the fourth win landed, co-founder and CEO DJ McCready put it plainly: being voted Australia's number one beer four years running had never been done before, and it was a testament to how hard the whole team works.
It has not been a one-beer show, either. In the most recent countdown, Status Quo took the crown while our New England IPA, Cult IPA, and the tropical Juice Trip also landed inside the hundred. Not bad for a brewery that started with a single venue and a stubborn idea about what beer could be.
Why Status Quo keeps winning
Ask us and the honest answer is that we never set out to make a beer that wins polls. We set out to chase really good beer, and we have done exactly that since day one.
It is the same short list of ingredients every brewer uses, malt, hops, water and yeast, pushed in our own direction. In practice that means leaning into the juicy, dry-hop-driven character drinkers love rather than playing it safe. When others zig, we zag. It is why Status Quo tastes the way it does, with a soft body and a clean finish, and why the beers around it, from the lighter Scenic Route to the bigger Cult IPA, all pull in the same direction.
Because the GABS Hottest 100 is decided by real drinkers, four wins in a row really means four straight years of people choosing to put us at the top. We do not take that lightly, and we are not planning to change the recipe any time soon. The name is a bit of a giveaway.
GABS Hottest 100 FAQs
How many beers can I vote for in the GABS Hottest 100?
You do not just pick one. Voters submit a shortlist of their favourite Australian craft beers for the year, usually a set number of picks rather than a single choice, and it is one ballot per person. That spread is deliberate. It stops any single brewery stacking the result by rallying everyone behind one beer.
How does results day actually work?
The whole list is revealed in one hit, traditionally on the fourth Saturday of January, counting from number 100 all the way up to the number one beer. It is streamed and posted in real time throughout the day, and plenty of breweries gather their teams to watch the results land like a grand final.
Is the GABS Hottest 100 the same as winning an award at the GABS festival?
The Hottest 100 is a nationwide public vote for beers already out in the market. The festival itself is a separate live event where breweries pour one-off beers made just for GABS, and festival-goers vote on their favourites from that specific line-up. A beer can shine at one without ever touching the other.
How is the GABS Hottest 100 different from Triple J's Hottest 100?
They share a name, a format and a January slot, but one counts down music and the other counts down beer. The beer poll borrowed the countdown idea from the radio version back in 2008, and the two have run as friendly cousins ever since. If your weekend involves arguing about song rankings and beer rankings in equal measure, you are in good company.
Where can I try Status Quo for myself?
Status Quo is sold in cans across much of the country and pours at our venues, including the original Katoomba brewpub, Emu Plains, Redfern in Sydney, our Melbourne venue and Hobart. Fresh from the brewery is the best way to drink any hazy pale ale, so if you are near one of the taprooms, that is the one to order.