Holy Goat Brewing from Dundee is the most exciting brewery in Scotland right now.
With their focus on big, powerfully-flavoured lip-puckering sours, they’re certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but for craft beer lovers they simply can’t be beat.
But with great craftsmanship comes a price tag that might make your regular beer drinker wince.
Their beautifully-adorned 375ml bottles range from just under £7, to almost £10 for the absolutely fanciest stuff – supermarket budget beer this ain’t.
But is it worth the price? Well, when you consider a pint of regular fizzy yellow stuff can be north of £5.50 in most pubs nowadays, I’d say 100% absolutely.
Here’s my review of my three favourites from Holy Goat Brewing.
Holy Goat beer 1: Sunsmasher Golden Sour
- 5.8%
- £6.69 per 375ml bottle from Hop Shop Aberdeen
- Holy Goat Brewing, Dundee
- Style: Golden Sour
Sunsmasher was made with apricots, and boy can you tell.
It’s like opening a pack of dried apricots, and eating it with a handful of dibdab dust… in the nicest possible way.
Profoundly sour, with a delicate balance of sweet, it’s like sunshine in a glass.
The closest beer I could compare it to is the Belgian apricot sour Fou’Foune from Cantillon, one of the highest-rated beers in the world – and if you know funcy beers like me, you know that’s saying something.
And you just know it’s a funky beer when the best before date on the bottle reads 18/11/2032. And no, that’s not a typo.
Straight to the five star rating.
Rating: 5/5
Holy Goat beer 2: 1867 Double Export Stout
- 8.4%
- £6.89 a 375ml bottle from Hop Shop Aberdeen
- Holy Goat Brewing, Dundee
- Style: Double Export Stout
I love a good stout, but when you start getting to the stronger end of things, the taste really needs to justify the higher booze percentages.
This is one of those beers.
Decadently thick and bittersweet chocolately, it’s like the richest dessert on the menu.
For a brewery to put out both bright fruity sours and dark brooding stouts like this, and they both hit the mark, is amazing.
Rating: 4.5/5
Holy Goat beer 3: Heather Honeybucket
- 6%
- £6.90 a 375ml bottle from the Holy Goat website
- Holy Goat Brewing, Dundee
- Style: Golden Sour
Another golden sour on the list, but this time, it’s much, much sweeter.
Holy Goat’s Heather Honeybucket is packed full of local Scottish ingredients, including elderflower foraged near the brewery, and honey from Falkland Estate in Fife.
It’s like a glassful of honey-soaked flapjacks, and as delicate in flavour as the most floral of gins.
Rating: 4.5/5
Kieran is a former craft beer barman and publishes his beer column every Tuesday online. You can also read his column in the P&J’s Food and Drink magazine, which you can find inside your Press and Journal newspaper every Saturday.
