What are we drinking this month?

Each month we’ll highlight what we’re liking with a quick rundown about why. There’s nothing really special here, it’s just what we happen to be drinking. It might be old, it might be new, it might be hard to get, it might be easy.

Take a look at previous beers of the month.

Mountain Goat Captain Amylase Rum Porter

Beer of the Month – July 2016

Label image taken from the Mountain Goat website.

Mountain Goat is one of Australia’s largest craft breweries and, despite being bought out by Asahi in late 2015, Mountain are still making some interesting beers. One of these beers is their newest Rare Breed, the Captain Amylase Porter.

For anyone who knows about home brewing, has read either our guide to mashing grain, or checked out our strike water temperature calculator, they’ll know that amylase is the main enzyme in malted grain that breaks complex sugars down to fermentable maltose during the mashing process. Without amylase, it would be impossible to make beer. Beer drinkers owe a lot to this little enzyme. It does all the work to make yeast food so that the yeast can turn that food into alcohol. Great!

So Mountain Goat has taken it upon themselves to make the Captain Amylase Rum Porter. It’s a tribute to our favourite enzyme. Mountain Goat call amylase the “unsung hero hero of the brewing process,” and we agree with them. So in solidarity, their latest Rare Breed is our beer of the month for July 2016.

Being of the American imperial style, this is a big porter, however, Mountain Goat have managed to keep the alcohol relatively down at 7.7% ABV. Yes, that’s still a decently strong beer, but when we’re talking imperial porters, there are bigger ones out there.

Mountain Goat have added a dash of rum to this beer, and it comes through in the aroma, along with the chocolate and other roasted malts. They’ve chosen to use more traditional Goldings and Fuggles hops, along with Super Pride of Ringwood, so they don’t come through hardcore in the aroma. It’s a porter after all, and they’re really relying on the malts here.

Similarly, Mountain Goat have allowed the malts to do their thing as the beer hits the mouth. In their tasting notes, the brewery has mentioned that they added molasses to the boil, which gives the wonderful addition of licorice. Throw the flavour of the rum in there and you’ve got a beer with some nice depth and body that’s a lot of fun to drink.

Mountain Goat haven’t shied away from playing with some additional ingredients on this brew. It’s always fun to see what else can be added to a beer to round out the more standard flavours that we all know and love. That’s the fun of craft beer drinking: lots of interesting flavours.

We’re getting into dark beer and porter weather here in Australia, so launching the Captain Amylase as their Rare Breed in July was a perfect choice. It’s a nice big beer to warm you up on a cold winter month. And that’s what’s so good about a porter. Especially a porter with rum in it!

This beer comes in nice and dry, which is right how an imperial porter should be. A nice wet milk porter can warm the belly, but it’s easier to drink a few of the dry ones; and with a tasty beer like this, even though it is on the stronger side, it’s hard to stop at just one.

We always love a porter here at Brew in Review, and we’re glad to name Mountain Goat’s Captain Amylase our Beer of the Month for July 2016. It adds to our overall dedication to porter including our research behind the name porter as well as numerous porter reviews.

Surprisingly though, this is our first Mountain Goat beer review! So we feel a bit bad that we’ve ignored such an iconic Australian brewery for so long. Sorry Mountain Goat guys! It’s easy to overlook such a prominent brewery just because we take them for granted.

Anyway, congratulations to Mountain Goat. Thanks for making us happy all these years and continuing to make great craft beer. We can’t wait to see what the next Rare Breed is going to be.

Snap this one up quick though. It’s a limited release.

This review was part of our regular beer of the month series, but we also have general craft beer reviews.