Whilst Apple’s hardware has a clever feature where you can re-install the operating system directly from the internet (essentially netboot install from Apple’s servers), it’s not always suitable if you need to install a machine on an offline connection or via a slow/expensive connection.

Fortunately Apple provides Mavericks as a .dmg file download which you can get from the app store – whilst that .dmg itself isn’t bootable (sadly) you can use a binary tool Apple provides inside it to generate installer media onto a USB drive.

Firstly download this Mavericks installer from the Apple store:

Proprietary Evil. Shiny shiny proprietary evil.

Then format a USB drive (at least 8GB) to have a single partition of type “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”, with a partition name of “InstallMe”.

Now you’ll either have a Mavericks installer inside your applications directory, or on your desktop as a dmg file. If on the desktop, mount the dmg. Once done, in your terminal you can run the installer application to generate an installer:

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia –volume /Volumes/InstallMe –applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app –nointeraction

(Replace /Applications with the path to the mounted dmg if installing from inside that).

You’ll see some output as it writes to the USB stick, it can take a while if your USB stick isn’t that fast.

Erasing Disk: 0%... 10%... 20%... 100%...
Copying installer files to disk...
Copy complete.
Making disk bootable...
Copying boot files...
Copy complete.
Done.

Once done, you can reboot and by holding down option you can select the USB stick to install from.

Thanks to this forum post for posting the original answer – there are a lot of long convoluted processes mentioned on the web, this is the easiest one by far out of all the options I found.