Until 1880, British brewers paid taxes based on how much malted barley they used—so, they had to use malted barley. That made British ales relatively straightforward affairs, as far as fermentables were concerned.
That year, however, Great Britain passed a law called the Free Mash-Tun Act, which decreed that brewers would be taxed on beer instead of malt. It liberated brewers when it came to their choice of raw materials. Freed of that constraint, it took all of about five minutes for them to start throwing everything plus the kitchen sink into their kettles.
At the time, dark ales were still ascendant in British brewing, and those beers—more forgiving than paler ones, in some ways—saw the most experimentation. Brewers added sugars, lactose, and oatmeal to their stouts, aiming to strengthen, sweeten, or add body or a marketing hook. (They also added meat solids, but that’s a different article.) The point is this: Once you have a base liquid that tastes chocolatey, sooner or later brewers are going to riff on that and turn their beers into liquid desserts.
Today, dessert stouts can annoy a certain kind of beer nerd because they seem like a cheat code or just too gimmicky. You brew up a thick, boozy stout, you add sweets, spices, maybe some fruit, et voilà, tiramisu in a glass. It sounds simple. All you have to do is dump in a bunch of sweet ingredients, right? Big stout + cinnamon + coconut = 25 bucks a bottle. Where’s the art in that?
Here’s the thing: That’s not how the best of these beers are made. In fact, the truth is almost the opposite—brewers go to mind-bending lengths and considerable cost to make them. They spend entirely too much time in the brewhouse creating thick, luscious worts; they use fresh, expensive ingredients; and they often age them for months or years in barrels. They’re typically expensive to make, expensive to buy, and—even when the concept sounds simple—the flavors can be as complex as the process involved in producing them.
If you’re still a skeptic, read on. Whether you end up enjoying the style or not, it’s hard to hear more about how these beers are made without at least developing a sense of respect.
First, however, let’s consider where they came from.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factories
Modern dessert stouts have evolved into their own category, distinct from the sweet stouts of the 19th and 20th centuries—but they share similar inspiration.
After their heyday, those sweet stouts, milk stouts, and oatmeal stouts all faded into relative obscurity as milds supplanted them in Britain. Dark ales in general were in serious decline by the 1970s. From those ashes rose a phoenix—but it first happened across the pond. Beginning in the 1970s with homebrew kits—and later on five- and 10-barrel systems—brewers started to revive interest in porters and stouts. And, like those who came before, they saw potential for some other flavors.
Inventive homebrewers were probably the first to start tinkering. By the time his landmark book, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, arrived in 1984, Charlie Papazian had been brewing for 14 years. He’d already self-published two brewing pamphlets, and in the book he included his favorite recipes—including the memorable Cherry Fever Stout.
“The complex blend of sweetness, bitterness, and cherry tang is euphorically pursued with a fragrance of hops and cherry fever,” Papazian writes. The idea enchanted a generation of brewers who may not have understood what he was talking about, but they definitely wanted to give it a shot.
The porous line between home- and microbrewing ensured that unconventionally flavored beers would soon appear on brewpub taps. Oregon’s Rogue Ales would eventually become known for its Chocolate Stout (and, later, its infamous Voodoo Doughnut collaborations), but brewmaster John Maier already was dabbling in flavor. “I did some crazy stuff back in the old days,” he says, chuckling. He recalls a garlic-and-oregano beer as an early foray into exotica. Rogue also made beers with marionberries and chocolate, among other things—and Hazelnut Brown Nectar is still in the core lineup. First brewed by Rogue in 1993, that recipe originally came from another homebrewer and friend of Maier’s, Chris Studach.
Experiments with sweeter flavor adjuncts were well established by the time another pivotal moment came in the mid-’90s—when Goose Island brewed the first bourbon-barrel–aged stout in Chicago. Oak created another platform for hefty stouts flavored by wood-vanillin and whiskey—they weren’t dessert stouts, exactly, but they offered compatible flavors and pushed a conceptual envelope.
Southern Tier in Lakewood, New York, was among the breweries to pick up that envelope and run with it. Their Imperial Stout debuted 20 years ago, followed by the Blackwater series of stouts flavored by coffee, chocolate, and more. These were among the first that truly fit the description of “dessert” stouts, made with lactose for a thicker, sweeter palate, and with ingredients that evoked specific desserts—such as crème brûlée and s’mores.
You Boiled It How Long?
Imperial stouts should never be watery, but one of the defining features of dessert stouts today—whatever their strength—is density. There are multiple ways to build that body, including the use of higher mash temperatures, specialty malts, lactose, and maltodextrin, and the brewers of big dessert stouts have been known to deploy all of them at once.
However, one of the main ways that they do it is with shockingly long boils.
Eighth State Brewing in Greenville, South Carolina, is known partly for beers such as Widdershins, a stout of 14.2 percent ABV brewed with Ecuadorian cacao nibs, toasted coconut, crushed Oreos, wild Thai bananas, and Tahitian vanilla. Cofounder and head brewer Cameron Owen started out by conducting massive 12-hour boils for these beers.
“The longer that we’re boiling, the less fermentable the beer is going to become because we’re converting [it] into more complex sugar chains,” he says. Eventually, because it helped to rationalize the production schedule while still offering the mouthfeel they wanted, Eighth State dropped the time and now does “only” an eight-hour boil.
In beers with so much going on flavor-wise, brewers often want to avoid adding more sugar to the profile. Instead, to preserve balance, they’re looking for more mouthfeel without the sweetness.
Even as a homebrewer, Marcus Baskerville was tinkering with big imperial stouts. As co-owner and head brewer at Weathered Souls in San Antonio, he aims to build a stout that “doesn’t have all the residual sugars and calories behind it.” The flavors he adds later—let’s say coconut, brownie fudge, and peanut butter, as with PB Fusion Technique—will enhance the perception of sweetness, anyway. Baskerville says he doesn’t want to “add sugar on top of sugar.”
In terms of boil times, though, Weathered Souls takes it to another level. Baskerville starts out with the first runnings off “basically a no-sparge mash.” He can get that gravity up to 1.120 (28°P) or higher, but then he begins a full day of boiling—as in, 24 hours or more. Seriously. The wort starts at a rolling boil but spends much of the time simmering, gradually reducing to a syrup-like consistency. The next day, the team adds a second wort made from an identical mash, to rehydrate the beer.
“Generally,” Baskerville says, describing the brew day, “we’ll start to boil it around 11 a.m. The brewer will come in the next morning, start the second batch, and then mash in on top of that, and then boil for a few more hours until we hit the gravity that we’re looking for.”
He says they go through all that trouble for a characteristic mouthfeel that only long boils can deliver and a texture that lands very differently from that of lactose.
Put Your Chef Hat
There’s a notion that brewers just “dump in a bunch of flavorings” for these beers. In fact, it’s not that easy to get the bang-on flavors of specific desserts or to achieve harmony among all the various ingredients.
Eighth State has an ambitious stout program that alternates between barrel-aged and “fresh” versions. In either case, “this whole area is just very ‘cheffy,’” Owen says. “It’s like understanding food and really trying to create a balance.”
At Weathered Souls, Baskerville also reaches for the analogy: “When we get into these types of beers, I like to put my chef hat on.”
Baskerville layers his flavorings in as if he’s making a sauce. Using a pecan pie–flavored beer as an example, he ticks off ingredients such as vanilla, maple syrup, cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg, along with toasted pecans. “People want to taste the pecan, but pecan extract to me tastes like cherry, and that’s not what pecans taste like.” To get that pecan-pie flavor, Weathered Souls toasts whole pecans.
In shooting for a particular flavor profile, whether it’s a specific dessert or just a mélange of flavors, Owen emphasizes the importance of flavor-building.
“There’s a lot less science involved and more feeling,” Owen says. “And so, for me, it was always, ‘Get the beer to where you want it.’” That often means adding the ingredients in smaller amounts and building them up, observing the interactions, and hitting a balance.
For example, Baskerville says, “If we’re adding any additional spices to the beer, then we tend to add those last, being that those typically have shorter extract points.”
Finally, Owen and Baskerville prefer whole ingredients to extracts or other processed flavorings, partly because the flavors come across as more natural in the beer. But it’s also because the brewers can process these ingredients in-house, giving them a lot more control over the outcome.
Baskerville spends several minutes describing how he processes coconut to create different flavors. Later, he points out how vanilla beans provide different flavors depending on where they were grown—and he uses different varieties, depending on the beer.
The Proof Is in the Pudding
As with any style, dessert stouts aren’t always good. They can cloy or taste artificial. However, when they’re really good, they have a certain “wow” factor that simpler beers lack.
Last year, the Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® editors named Weathered Souls’ Gud Mawnin’ Mon—featuring cacao nibs, coconut, hazelnuts, Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, and maple syrup—one of their Best 20 Beers in 2023 (see beerandbrewing.com). “Among many blockbuster barrel-aged dessert stouts in our blind tasting, this was the clear standout,” they write. “Viscous and leggy in the glass, it’s of that modern style that maximizes body and character.”
Everyone focuses on the headline flavors in dessert stouts, but these beers aren’t just gimmicks. Ultimately, they’re also process beers. Without creating the right canvas on which those flavors will play, they lack depth and fall apart.
They’re also a good deal more sophisticated than their detractors acknowledge. I sometimes wish we could magically bring one of those old brewers from England into our time to taste these beers. They may have thought their milk stouts were radical. What would they make of today’s Black Forest cake stouts?