Despite the name, this beer does not feature yams in any way shape or form. It does include pumpkin, which is not a yam, making this one confusing right from the off.
A yam is a sweet potato and, if you've ever tried, you'll know that carving them is tricky. Luckily for us the name isn't representative of what you need to do with it and you can enjoy this smooth coffee and pumpkin porter in peace and leave the yams in the cupboard.
Elusive Brewing has used lots of pumpkin flavour and pumpkin spice in the brewing process along with Hasbean coffee beans and a whole host of seasonal spices like nutmeg, ginger and clove to make a spooky, seasonal beer that's perfect post-tick or treat drinking.
The main sense from the aroma is coffee, that lovely cold-brew aroma of the beans oozing forth from the can pop, followed by a hint of ginger and nutmeg. It pours expectedly thin for a 5.3% porter with a dark brown, almost muddy colour.
The flavour of the beer is mainly coffee and although it's a very solid coffee porter, it's disappointing not to get much of the pumpkin addition in the flavour profile. The flavour evolves from coffee into a more spiced flavour with the nutmeg and ginger really the stars of the show, a little ginger spiciness into the aftertaste that tingles your throat a little with the bittersweetness of the coffee.
A spooky design for a spooky beer, but spooky in a kind of video game sense of things. It looks like how you would structure a level in an 8-bit video game, with the pumpkin rightly taking centre stage (except for in the beer itself), with some spooky 8-bit bats and a spider fluttering around the dark wood.
It's a really cool can design and the text on the back sticks to the same kind of video game font, making it a very fun can to look at and certainly one that makes you want to take it home. The information on the back is a nice biography about the beer and what's inside it along with all the usual details.
Tricky to find online this one, but luckily Elusive Brewing have given us a treat by making it easy to get from their website for the sweet price of £4.50 a can. We got ours from our local bottle shop so that's very much worth a shout too if you have a good one nearby.
