Best Friends Break Guinness World Record Visiting 99 Bars in 24 Hours

Two Australian buddies broke a Guinness World Record when they hit 99 separate Sydney bars in 24 hours. 26-year-olds Harry Kooros and Jake Loiterton shattered the previous pub hopping record by some margin. Last year, Heinrich de Villiers of South Africa claimed the title after visiting 78 taverns.

Kooros and Loiterton spent AU$1,500 (about $985) during their merry outing, per The Drinks Business, but their pursuit was entirely altruistic. Guinness World Records confirmed that the duo undertook their mission to raise money for multiple-sclerosis research charity MS Australia and call attention to the city’s waning nightlife. Kooros and Loiterton lamented that the club scene had been “decimated” during the pandemic.

“We wanted to try to reignite the spark in a declining piece of what makes Sydney so great,” Kooros told Guinness.

They began at midnight to work around Sydney’s legal operation hours. Most bars close at 2 a.m., and since the rules forbade the boys from using any private form of transportation, they had to hoof it. Finding few pubs open, and growing increasingly ill, they “rested” until around 9 a.m., first in a park and then in a coffee shop.

Though it got off to an inauspicious start, once bars began opening in earnest the two men had trouble staying in one place for too long. Aiming to spend just 14 minutes in each location, they found themselves with “very little downtime” during their marathon crawl. It helped that Sydney’s extremely strict public drunkenness laws kept the two from going too wild.

“While we initially planned to have an alcoholic drink at every second pub and having non-alcoholic drinks at alternating pubs, we quickly changed this plan,” Kooros recalled. “We needed to keep from being too inebriated so that we were let into all the pubs.”

Kooros and Loiterton traversed 27 miles of Sydney, all on foot, in a route that took them months to plan. As badly as they wanted it, though, both men are still stunned by the record achievement.

“It feels a little surreal to be honest,” Kooros marveled. “There is a sense of accomplishment that comes not only from breaking a record but also from the meticulous planning and execution required to break the record.”

Though he admitted to “a decent amount of fatigue the Sunday after,” Kooros remembers the event as a wonderful day which gave him an excuse to make “some great memories with friends.”