Dessert in a glass. The next best thing to a slice of cake. Some intensely flavored, full-bodied beer styles, like Imperial Stout or barrel aged beers, are often described as having a dessert-like quality. We take this flavor approach quite literally with Cookie Exchange Milk Stout, brewed each year with a rotating cookie-inspired flavor. Our seasonal stout is part of a growing trend of truly decadent dark brews nicknamed “Pastry Stout” for their intentional channeling of specific sweet treats. We’re not hinting at the scrumptious Peanut Butter Blossom cookie here – take one sip, and it feels like you’re biting into the baked good itself.

As with other newer beer styles, like Hazy IPAs and Fruited Wheats, our brewers combine traditional techniques and unconventional ingredients to achieve Cookie Exchange’s unique flavor profile. Let’s look at the methods that transform a simple stout into liquid cookie goodness.

Appropriately enough, the base beer for our cookie-inspired brew is a Milk Stout! (Yes, we approve of dunking cookies in your beer.) This traditional stout substyle first found popularity in early 20th century Britain before making its way across the pond to American craft brewery taplists, often served via a creamy nitrogenated pour. While you won’t be helping your daily calcium intake with this beer, the style is brewed with lactose sugar and malted barley. Brewer’s yeast creates plenty of alcohol and carbon dioxide from the latter, but they’re unable to metabolize lactose (one could say they’re lactose intolerant). As a result, this sugar remains in the finished beer, giving the brew a fuller mouthfeel and more intense sweetness. The resulting stout is delicious in and of itself, and with plentiful residual sugars, it’s also a perfect canvas to layer on rich, dessert-like flavors. While not all Pastry Stouts contain lactose, using it is the most common way to provide an intensely sweet base beer to build equally sweet flavors upon.

It's at this point that Pastry Stout takes a uniquely American craft beer turn. Where in the past, one might have seen a Coffee Stout and expected a roasty brew with a complement of coffee flavor, the goal of Pastry Stout is to make the beer taste literally like the dessert it is named for! While some dark malts can convey chocolate, nutty, and dark fruit character, creating a Neapolitan or Black Forest Cake stout is going to require culinary ingredients beyond hops and malts. We call these additional ingredients “adjuncts,” and when it comes to pastry stout, brewers must spare no expense. Intensity is the name of the game! Anything that could go into sweets is up for grabs here: chocolate, coffee, coconut, vanilla, maple syrup, peanut butter, and marshmallow, just to name a few. Fruits, nuts, and spices may be used as well.

This year’s version of Cookie Exchange employs chocolate, peanut butter, and vanilla flavors to achieve the Peanut Butter Blossom flavor profile (look for a new cookie-inspired flavor each season). If it’s an ingredient in the pastry, it’s probably going to be an ingredient in the beer, and since these flavors need to be in-your-face, there’s going to be a large quantity of adjuncts involved. The culinary ingredients themselves are the key here – tossing in a sheet cake is not required, as fun as it might be. And while many Pastry Stouts match the intensity of dessert-like flavors with a high alcohol content, Cookie Exchange packs a mighty cookie punch at just 5.5% ABV.

Satiate your sweet tooth with Cookie Exchange Milk Stout. Find it in 6-Packs, on Draft, and in the Holiday Pack alongside Christmas Ale. Use our Beer Finder to track down our beers near you.

Words by Michael Williams

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