Pastry stout

Lactose, or milk sugar, is in many pastry stouts. The trade journal Brauwelt International calls them 'typically sweet, lactose-heavy'. Gordon Strong of the brewing magazine Brew Your Own names lactose as one of the unfermentable sugars that keep the beer sweet.

Still, lactose is not in the style description of the Brewers Association. That lists culinary ingredients such as chocolate, coffee, coconut, vanilla, maple syrup, peanut butter and marshmallow, and 'the addition of sugars from any source'. The sweetness can therefore also come from other sugars, and from a heavy malt bill.

If you avoid lactose, the label is your friend. In the EU lactose falls under the allergen 'milk'. For beer above 1.2% alcohol an ingredients list is not mandatory, but an allergen does have to be declared, with the word 'contains'. That is only not needed if the name of the product already clearly refers to the allergen. CraftBeer.com of the Brewers Association writes of milk stout, which contains lactose, that people with lactose intolerance had probably better leave that style alone.

According to Gordon Strong in the brewing magazine Brew Your Own, the name 'pastry stout' seems to have been used for the first time around 2017, as a slightly mocking term. The Brewers Journal (2021) attributes it to the American beer blogger Alex Kidd, who came up with it in 2017 as an insult for very sweet, strong stouts full of flavourings. Brauwelt International (2024) puts it at around 2014 and names no name.

On who and when, the sources therefore do not agree. On the mocking start, the two sources that say anything about it do agree.

The mockery did not work. The name stuck and brewers started using it themselves. In 2023 the Brewers Association included 'Dessert or Pastry Stout' in its style guidelines, because such beers were increasingly on the market.

IBU (International Bitterness Units) is, according to CraftBeer.com, a measure of the bitter compounds in beer, determined in the lab as milligrams of iso-alpha acids (converted bitter compounds from hops) per litre. The Brewers Association writes in its style guidelines that this figure measures one specific hop compound and does not consistently match how bitter someone perceives the beer. It gives three reasons for that: sensitivity to bitterness differs per person (partly through genetic make-up), other ingredients also contribute to bitterness, and hop aroma and flavour can strongly change the perceived bitterness.

The guidelines themselves give examples. For Export-Style Stout the BA writes that the bitterness can turn out high in the lab, but that the sweetness of the malt dampens the perception. Conversely the BJCP says of kölsch that drier versions can seem hoppier or more bitter than the IBU suggests. And in hazy IPA the bitterness is, according to the BJCP, often masked by the fuller body and the soft finish.

For orientation: CraftBeer.com gives 5–10 IBU for light lagers and 50–70 for robust, bitter IPAs. So use IBU as a rough indication, not as a flavour promise.