Better Than Ice Cream? These Dessert Beers Are Our New Postrun Treats
Craft brewers have recreated cookies, pie, and cake in fantastically delicious liquid form.
The days for refreshing beers, recovery beers, and non-alcoholic beers are many—any day with a sunny run will do. But then there are the huge-PR celebrations, the massive, crawl-home workouts, and the days where it’s so cold it hurts to breathe. For those especially big days, we recommend you consider a dessert beer. Typically stronger, often darker, and always sweeter than your average ale or lager, these rich and comforting beers either recreate favorite desserts in liquid form, or take inspiration from them. As the days grew shorter and winter approached, the Runner’s World team gathered around a table of dessert beer contenders. These eight are our favorites.
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Hardywood Gingerbread Stout
This 9-percent ABV brew made us question why it was the first stout we’d ever tasted with fresh ginger—it’s really good! The ginger stands out from the chocolate and roast of the big, slightly sweet stout, but complements, rather than bowling over what would likely be a great stout on it’s own.
Funky Buddha French Toast
French toast, at least in beer form, makes a better a sweet treat to end a meal than start your day. From our tasting, this maple-heavy, 8.8-percent brown ale is the first we thought we’d enjoy pouring over the dish that inspired it.
Anchor Christmas Ale
Though the label bears a Christmas tree, that’s by no means is what it tastes like. Anchor’s longtime winter seasonal caught our attention for smelling, and largely tasting, like banana bread. There’s also spice and toasty caramel malts in this deep-red, 6.9-percent ale, but the banana bread dominates and we (well, most of us) love it.
Carton Primoodonna
This carrot cake beer really tastes like carrot cake. Even in a field of dessert beers, we were a little stunned. In collaboration with Bolero Snort Brewery, the team at New Jersey’s Carton Brewing built this 7-percent ABV, porter-based beer out of carrot cake ingredients—carrot sugar, walnut flour, raisins, cinnamon, and vanilla bean—and combined them with impressive accuracy. Until we tried it, we honestly didn’t know a beer could taste like this.
Wicked Weed Milk & Cookies
For folks with strong cookie preferences, know that oatmeal raisin serves as the inspiration for this beer (at least one chocolate chip enthusiast was disappointed). This black, 8.5-percent stout combines vanilla, raisins, and cinnamon with smooth, roasted barley. For an extra kick, seek out the 11.3-percent bourbon barrel-aged version.
High Water Sugaree Maple Pecan Pie
Vermont maple sugar, pecans, and caramel barley flavors dominate this impressive recreation of one of our favorite pies. But the highlight is a toasty vanilla character that comes from High Water aging this 9.8-percent ABV beer on bourbon barrel oak chips.
Reuben’s Brews Hazelnut Praline
A massive beer at 14 percent, the Hazelnut Praline is a bottle to share with friends—a lot of them. Reuben’s Brews designed this stout to taste like a chocolate truffle, and it is indeed rich with cocoa and hazelnut. It’s the first release in Reuben’s Brews Chocolate Box series of barrel-aged beers. If Hazelnut Praline has sold out, we trust it’s worth hunting down the next release.
Founders Canadian Breakfast Stout
Once a rarity tasted only by only the most committed beer lovers, CBS has been scaled up as Founders Brewing has grown. Thankfully, as its scarcity has diminished, quality has not. The roughly 12-percent stout still sits in bourbon barrels that previously aged maple syrup, creating an extra sweet kick over the fresh coffee and big chocolate flavors.
We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back Bicycling and Runner's World magazines. He's run nine marathons and come heartbreakingly close to BQing three times. In addition to running and cycling, he's also covered beer for more than a decade and is a certified beer judge.
