Drink Your Dessert: Brewers Are Sweet on Pastry Stouts | Imbibe Magazine

Photo credit: Aubrie Legault

Nowadays, the sugary desires of children and adults are overlapping in a Venn diagram of dessert-inspired stouts, spreading across the country like a puddle of sticky chocolate syrup. Commonly called “pastry stouts” (Alex Kidd of satirical website Don’t Drink Beer is credited with coining the phrase), these rich, adjunct-laden beers take inspiration from candy bars, ice cream and treats of every persuasion. They offer a new breed of liquefied comfort food, brimming with chocolate and nostalgia. “You’re appealing to the simplest sense of desire, and everything you remember being extra-decadent when you were a kid,” says Matt Monahan, the co-founder and CEO of Other Half Brewing, based in Brooklyn. That means cocoa, marshmallows and caramel, “stuff that’s super-simple but can also be done as a beverage, especially beer, in really high-end ways.”

For Imbibe, I dive deep into the sticky-sweet world of dessert-inspired stouts. Curious?