Firstly, a big thanks to everyone who’s ordered, liked, followed, visited the website and read any of the blog articles! We’ve been blown away by the support so far and it’s massively appreciated. Everyone’s orders went out this week and should be with them soon!
In this blog article we’ll be going into more detail on the first two beers.
Goat Wizard – The Beer
This will be a mid-strength golden sour ale, using local Scottish malts and fermented with a mixed culture of our favourite ultra-fruity strains of Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus and Kveik yeast. This is a mixture of ultra-fruity cultures which I’ve messed around with separately for some time and had a good feeling they would work well together. A trial batch conducted recently has proven this right and it’s tasting intensely tropical with pineapple, passionfruit and apricot over a light easy-going sherberty acidity. This will feature as the first (of many) Holy Goat ‘house cultures’, which we will treat in different manners, fruiting, citrus-ing, dry-hopping and anything else we can think of. We’ll not divulge yet what will be added to this first beer, partly because we haven’t decided yet, but rest assured it will be tasty.
Goat Wizard – The Artwork
The first detailed illustration we had commissioned was for Goat Wizard and Jimbob pulled an absolute blinder! It stands alone as a beautiful piece of art, and we’re currently putting together bottle label mockups which will do this work justice, so stay tuned for those. The Goat Wizard exemplifies the experimental and magical nature of mixed-culture fermentation brewing and looks metal as fuck.
Crimson Queen – The Beer
This will be a mid to high strength sour red ale, inspired by the Belgian Flanders Red tradition. This beer style is notable for its classic sweet and sour profile, which lends it well to producing vinous, complex sour beer. Typical examples feature extended barrel/foudre aging (6-18 months) and this version will likely feature some of our first barrel aged blended beer. The organisms chosen for this initial batch feature a strain of Brettanomyces known for producing delicious cherry and red berry fruit funkiness. These flavours will be layered on a complex malt base featuring fruity crystal malts and a touch of biscuity roasted malts giving a deep crimson hue. Finally, we will be refermenting this base beer on a judicious quantity of Scottish berries. This is the beer I’ve been dreaming about making for a while.
Crimson Queen – The Artwork
Another absolute belter, Jimbob’s latest creation hit the nail on the head with the design brief. It portrays the complexity, beauty and reverence this beer style deserves and gives a counterpoint and mood change to the previous Goat Wizard piece. It also gives a cheeky little indication of the sort of fruiting this beer will receive.
Thanks for joining us on this journey, the final beer in this first set is Foehammer, – a monstrous old school Russian Imperial Stout – the artwork for which is currently in progress. If its anything like we’re imagining it should be very tasty and evil. Stay tuned for updates on that. Also check out our new merch on the webshop.
Finally, from Team Holy Goat have an awesome Xmas and New Year! Bring on 2021!
Cheers,
Hail the Goat!
