Pastry Stout

Tier B · Ale, fermented warm. A strong stout loaded with dessert ingredients and unfermentable sugar.

ABV

8-12%

IBU

10-40

SRM

30-40

Serve

50-55F

Glass

Snifter

Pour

4-8 oz

Identify

Opaque black, and it looks thick before you taste it. The head is often small and it usually collapses within a minute, because sugar and fat from the adjuncts work against foam. The smell is the loudest in the module: vanilla, chocolate, coconut, coffee or marshmallow, often several at once. Thick, heavy and clearly sweet. The roast is there but it is behind the sugar rather than in front of it. Carbonation is low. The alcohol is usually high and often well hidden, which is part of the risk. The finish is sweet and long, and it does not clean up after itself.

Place

The United States, from the 2010s. The beers came first and the name arrived later, as an insult.

Cause

Sweetness in beer is not one decision, it is three working together. Sugar the yeast cannot eat, sugar the yeast was not given time to eat, and almost no bitterness to push back against either. Lactose comes from milk. A beer containing it is not vegan, and it is not suitable for anyone avoiding dairy or managing lactose intolerance.

Confused with

Sweet or Milk Stout, which uses the same sugar at half the strength and a fraction of the intensity. Imperial Stout, which is just as strong and finishes bitter. Oatmeal Stout, which gets its body from grain rather than sugar. Barrel aged stout, where the extra flavour came from wood.

Numbers

A pastry stout is a strong stout brewed to taste like a dessert. Brewers add vanilla, cacao nibs, coconut, coffee, maple, marshmallow or peanut butter, and they usually add lactose as well. The result is sweet on purpose. Tilt the glass and watch the inside wall.

Will you like it, Order and Try

Dessert after dinner, and the idea of a drink standing in for one. Sweet coffee drinks, hot chocolate, or a milkshake. Sweet cocktails and liqueurs. That is the closest thing in strength and in sugar. Sharing one glass around a table. This is a beer that improves when four people have two mouthfuls each. You want more than one drink.

Pair, Judge, Myth and Remember

Start with the awkward truth. This beer is already a dessert, so putting it next to another one usually makes both taste worse. Sugar on sugar flattens everything and the beer stops tasting of anything but weight. Cake, brownies, chocolate puddings and anything else sweet. It is the obvious pairing and it is the wrong one.