Pastry Stouts and Novelty Beers

Oh goddammit, not more of this nonsense!” I yell at my phone, projecting my yell at the world of beer in early 2018; a world of psychedelic DIPAs and freakshake stouts served with sprinkles.

Last week they Instagrammed a nuclear yellow fruit beer in an impossible-to-drink-from bauble. There’s never-ending juicebox IPAs, things brewed with everything you never thought should go in a beer, and then there’s the soft serve beer. A frappé whip of frosty foam that comes with a Flake or some other kind of unnecessary chocolatey accessory. It used to be a joke that a badly poured pint deserved a Flake wedged into it. Not anymore. We’ve hit a point of peak nonsense, a pique point of novelty beers and pastry stouts.

Let me explain the name ‘Pastry Stout.’ I use it like this: ‘Ah man, another Pastry Stout.’ Other people use it like this: ‘Ah man, I need me some more of those sweeeeet Pastry Stoutzzz.’

The ‘pastry’ part is a reference to the adjuncts. Anything that gives a beer qualities, flavours or fermentables that’s not water, malt, hops or yeast counts as an adjunct. It could be rice in industrial lager, orange peel in a Witbier, candi sugar in a Quadruple, and then all the way through to the far extremities of the pastry section of the beer aisle. The pantry of syrups and sauces, of chocolate bars and cinnamon rolls, via the imaginarium of the man-child brewer with a sweet tooth and eyes sweet on fluffing the beergasms of dogmatic beer geeks.

Sundaes and smoothies, cupcakes and cookies, tiramisus and truffles, milkshakes and marshmallows; there’s ice cream, cheesecake, cornflakes and doughnuts; cacao, coconut, nut syrups, maple syrup, milk sugar, always some vanilla, usually shitloads of coffee, all freakshaked into a Fat Impy that’s over-adjuncted and under-attenuated. Most taste like American gas stations: flavoured hazelnut coffee, vanilla in everything, cinnamon doughnuts and fusel fumes.

These kind of dosed-up, dolled-up beers have been around for a long time and flavoured stouts are not new. Some of the most hyped-up and highly-rated beers – most of the most hyped-up and highly-rated beers – are laden with sweetness, where the person that sips small instead of drinks deep is rewarded with that immediate hit and sugar rush.

While the flavours aren’t new, their intensity is and they’ve gone to Full Pastry by getting sweeter, squidgier, sicklier and less like beer. There’s an immature obviousness to the flavour. A fast-food, fast-rewarding saccharine smash and the smell of childhood treats with the adulthood impact of alcohol.

It’s probably a symptom of a generation used to getting what they want, when they want it; the full fat, build-your-own, attention-seeker that checks the reviews and only bothers with the biggest rates (4.471 on Untappd) because, you know, no-one cares if you’re drinking milds or märzen (only 3.602 on Untappd). They appeal to the home drinker who wants to be seen drinking something, to be seen to have acquired something rare, rather than perhaps wanting to drink that beer as a great liquid in itself (there’s no kudos for the I’d rather have a lager drinker, is there?).

So there’s that, plus the world is messed up right now and we’re thinking: “Bugger it, I’ll just have the ice cream and the brownie and the peanut butter crunch and I want it all with 12% alcohol.” A fuck-the-world 400-calorie quaff of kamikaze cake beer.

Imperial Stouts have gone from Brooklyn Black Chocolate to Beer Geek Brunch to Bourbon County Stout to Triple Chocolate Coconut Ice Cream Sundae. They’ve gone from intense dark roast to intenser darker roast to powerful barrel-aging to being just about as refreshing – and I’m a drinker that values refreshment in my beer, you understand – as a pint of custard.

But here’s the twist: I’d love a pint

They've gone to Full Pastry by getting sweeter, squidgier, sicklier and less like beer of custard. And many of these beers are amazing liquids, as treat-like as any pudding and it comes with a wallop of booze, too. They wow with their wonderful and intense flavours, their delicious naughty-niceness. And I’d love to open a blueberry cheesecake stout to go with blueberry cheesecake. I’d love to serve it to someone who ‘doesn’t like beer’ because they’ll probably love this one and they’ll say to their friends on Monday, ‘I had a blueberry cheesecake beer this weekend and it was actually alright. I didn’t used to like beer but that was, you know, different!’ They work for beer nerds and the beer averse and it makes sense that people think highly of them because they’ve got such big and impactful flavours.

So I get Pastry Stouts. And I know why people love them, even if I think most are now far too sweet. But it’s the novelty beer that really bugs me. It’s the what the fuck are you doing now thing. It’s the soft served with candy or pie on top thing, the marshmallows s’mores’d onto the rim of the glass, pouring a beer into something completely impractical to drink from just because it looks cool, the beers brewed with frozen pizza and dollar bills or Doritos and Mountain Dew (I don’t think that one’s real but who knows).

It’s combinations of things which don’t ever, ever go together – in the brewery or the kitchen – which are now actual beers: lemon meringue ice cream sour, pancake lassi gose, candy popcorn sour. And how about this one: Nitro bourbon barrel-aged cinnamon pecan mud cake stout with toasted poppy seeds, charcoal and cold smoked bacon dust. That’s an actual beer. I feel like there’s an in-joke and I’m outside of it.

Beer is growing down. It’s getting stoopider, sweeter, sillier. There’s a gulf between flavoured beers for the sake of deliciousness and those ludicrous liquids served with stuff. We don’t need stuff, do we? It’s being done for likes, isn’t it? For double-tapped red hearts and Untappd five stars.

Apparently it’s working. That’s the world we’re living in right now, a world that’s a mess and we’re going to sugarcoat the shit by drinking pastry stout from a vase with an iced doughnut and fizzy sweets floating on the foam. Better Instagram it before the soft serve melts.