One of Public House Brewing Co.’s most popular seasonal beers is getting ready for its annual return, but this year’s Giddy Goat Coffee Milk Stout will taste a little different.
The Rolla brewery plans to begin shipping Giddy Goat to its wholesale partners in early September, with the beer also returning in draft and packaged form at the Public House pub in Rolla.
What’s new this year isn’t the familiar goat on the label.
It’s what’s going into the beer.
“The Giddy Goat Coffee Milk Stout is one of the most sought-after beers in our limited release/seasonal program,” Public House CEO Josh Stacy said.
A beer with a longer history than we knew
Giddy Goat has been around considerably longer than Drink314’s first story about the beer in 2019.
Stacy said the first batches were brewed in 2013 on Public House’s original 3.5-barrel brewhouse in Rolla.
“I believe 2016 was the first year that we scaled up and packaged for wholesale distribution,” Stacy said. “Prior to that you had to travel to the Rolla pub each winter to get you fix.”
Public House has continued bringing the stout back each fall.
When Drink314 wrote about Giddy Goat in 2019, the story detailed some of the work that went into matching coffee with the beer. Public House experimented with several stout bases while Giddy Goat Coffee House supplied multiple cold-brew options. The combinations were narrowed to two finalists before customers participated in a blind tasting.
At the time, the winning combination paired a milk stout with Papua New Guinea Nebilyer Valley coffee. The resulting beer was described as having roasted coffee, dark chocolate and sweet malt notes with a creamy finish.
Seven years later, the partnership with Giddy Goat Coffee House remains.
The coffee, however, is changing.
Enter Rockabilly
Giddy Goat Coffee House is now working with Yield Coffee Roasters of Cincinnati, and that relationship is making its way into this year’s stout.
“The particular roast that we are using in this year’s batch is the Rockabilly,” Stacy said. “This is the Giddy Goats proprietary house espresso roast.”
Stacy called the new roast “the main change/enhancement to this year’s recipe.”
Public House is also keeping its method of getting the coffee character into the beer.
“We are still using a hybridized cold brew technique to extract the flavor and then blend back into the finished product,” Stacy said.
The brewery was scheduled to package this year’s Giddy Goat later in August.
There’s also a timely convergence behind this particular batch.
A representative from Yield Coffee Roasters was scheduled to visit Rolla at the same time Public House was preparing the beer. Stacy said representatives from Public House, Giddy Goat and Yield planned to meet at the brewery and taste the first run of the new version together.
“It is very exciting to have all three partners together at one time,” Stacy said.
Same goat, new coffee
Public House’s recent social media teaser prompted another question: Was Giddy Goat getting new artwork as well?
Nope.
“The artwork will remain the same,” Stacy said.
That artwork has its own history. In the original 2019 Drink314 story, Public House said Rolla-area artist and military veteran Travis Watkins created the Giddy Goat artwork as part of a broader reworking of the brewery’s labels during its transition to cans.
So the goat stays.
The coffee changes.
And sometime in early September, one of Public House’s longtime fall seasonals starts making its way back into glasses.
