Holy Goat Brewing

As breweries go, things don’t get much weirder than Holy Goat.

Set up and run by Vault City alumni, Holy Goat focuses on brewing mixed-fermentation, wood-aged beers – with a definite slant towards the sour and funky end of the craft beer spectrum.

The story goes that the Holy Goat brewers became frustrated at Vault City. Vault City had perfected a formula for exquisite beer making that proved tough to break away from. So the Holy Goat brewers broke away from the brewery themselves, to start experimenting with weirder ways of brewing funky, outrageous, envelope-pushing craft beer.

Holy Goat love mixed-ferm brewing as much as anyone, which means they tend to use multiple, often unconventional yeasts and bacteria to brew their beer. Why? Because they’re aiming to brew stuff that breaks boundaries; stuff that’s unlike anything you can get anywhere else.

They’re driven by experimentation, that’s for sure. You might think their beers are hit and miss – but you’d be wrong to do so. Pretty much everything these guys touch turns to gold, and they’re very much lauded and acclaimed by beer enthusiasts. It helps that they go to extremes when selecting their ingredients – you’ll often find they use things like first-harvest whole Sicilian lemons specifically in their sour sorcery. Sure, regular lemons wouldn’t make much of a difference. But these guys are after brilliance, and pull out all the stops in its pursuit.

Where does the name Holy Goat come from? From the the ‘goat’ like qualities of wild yeast (Brettanomyces), according to the brewery. But sip one of these things. Holy Goat! is an appropriate utterance.