Some Mores Returns, With Crystal Malt Doing the Graham Cracker

A s'more has three parts, and Hitchhiker's malt bill was already handling two of them before anything got added. Some Mores is back Friday at 8.5 percent, with the third part layered on top.

Style: S'Mores Pastry Stout
Release Date: 2026-09-11
ABV: 8.5%
Hitchhiker Brewing Co. (Pittsburgh, PA)

A s'more has three parts. Two of them are already in the beer before anything gets added to it.

Hitchhiker Brewing Co. brings Some Mores back this week, an 8.5 percent pastry stout built on Crystal and dark malts and then conditioned on chocolate, marshmallow and graham cracker. The brewery led its release announcement with this beer, ahead of the two others going out the same day.

The malt bill is the part worth pausing over. Crystal malt is stewed while still wet, so the starches convert to sugar inside the husk before the grain is kilned. What comes out is caramel, toffee and a distinctly biscuity, toasted-grain character. That is graham cracker territory almost exactly. Dark malt covers the chocolate end by the same logic. The adjunct list then adds actual graham cracker and actual chocolate on top, so the beer arrives at two of its three target flavors from two directions at once.

Marshmallow is the one that has to be imported. It is also the hardest of the three to carry in a finished beer, being mostly sugar, air and vanilla. The vanilla is the part with any real staying power. The rest tends to register as body and sweetness rather than as a flavor you could name blind, which is precisely why the roast bitterness of the dark malt matters here. It is the thing keeping a beer at this strength and sweetness from reading as syrup.

Some Mores is available for pre-order now, with pick-up beginning Friday, September 11 at the Mt. Lebanon and Sharpsburg locations.

Editor’s Take

There is a quiet annual contest over which dessert gets to represent autumn, and the pumpkin has held the belt so long that most breweries have stopped bothering to challenge it. Hitchhiker has put the s'more forward instead, and I think it is the stronger candidate. A pumpkin spice beer is a beer about a flavor. A s'more is a beer about a situation: it is dark, you are outdoors, it is colder than you dressed for, and somebody has just produced a bag of marshmallows from the bottom of a rucksack. That is a far more useful thing for a beer to be about.

The happy technicality is that a s'more is two-thirds solved in the brewhouse before a single adjunct goes near it. Crystal malt already does a decent graham cracker. Dark malt already does chocolate. Only the marshmallow has to be smuggled in from outside, which makes this the rare pastry stout where most of the pastry was already on the premises.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.