Apple Crumble A La Mode Keeps the Loaded Series' Graham Crust

Bunnyman's Loaded series swaps the dessert and keeps the base. Apple cinnamon and vanilla ice cream ride on the same graham cracker foundation as the blueberry cheesecake version, with Sour Fest a couple of weeks out.

Style: Imperial Fruited Sour
Release Date: 2026-09-17
ABV: N/A
Bunnyman Brewing (Burke, VA)

Loaded is Bunnyman Brewing's imperial sour series, and it runs to a formula. The dessert changes. The crust and the cream stay where they are.

The Northern Virginia brewery describes this entry as a dessert-inspired imperial sour loaded with apple cinnamon, graham cracker and creamy vanilla ice cream, and lists it among its September releases.

Set it beside the sibling currently pouring at the Lorton taproom and the pattern is easy to see. Loaded: Blueberry Cheesecake With Raspberries is an 8.4 percent imperial sour built on blueberry, raspberry, cream cheese, graham cracker and vanilla. Two different desserts, two different fruits, and the same graham cracker and vanilla underneath both of them. That shared base is what lets the series read as a series rather than a run of unrelated fruited sours, and it leaves the fruit and the spice to do the naming.

Bunnyman is running a parallel line alongside it. Crumbs: Lemon Passion Fruit Meringue Pie, an 8.3 percent imperial sour with lemon, passionfruit, vanilla, graham cracker and milk sugar, is on the Lorton list as well. Between the two series the brewery has a standing format for turning a named dessert into a large sour beer, which is a more deliberate operation than most breweries bring to the category.

No ABV has been published for Apple Crumble A La Mode. The two comparable entries above both sit above 8 percent, so the series is not a modest one.

The timing points somewhere specific. Bunnyman holds Sour Fest at its Chantilly taproom on October 3 and 4, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. both days, and the brewery says the lineup this year is its widest yet.

We've been deep in the lab brewing tart, funky, fruity, and dessert-inspired chaos, and it's almost time to pour.

An apple crumble imperial sour arriving in the middle of September, two weeks ahead of that, looks less like a standalone release than an early sample of what is coming. Bunnyman operates three Fairfax County taprooms, in Burke, Lorton and Chantilly, each with its own tap list.

Editor’s Take

Line up Bunnyman's dessert beers and the same ingredient keeps turning up. Graham cracker is in the apple crumble. It is in the blueberry cheesecake. It is in the lemon passion fruit meringue pie over in the Crumbs series, and it is in Campfire Song, which is a smoked porter and has no business being in this paragraph at all. Four beers, three different styles, one box of graham crackers apparently doing overtime.

It makes complete sense once you see it. Graham cracker is the load-bearing wall of American dessert. Crumble topping, cheesecake base, pie crust, the flat bit of a s'more: it is the same toasted, faintly honeyed crumb underneath nearly all of it, and it turns out to be the shortest route to making a beer taste baked rather than merely sweet. Somebody at this brewery worked that out and has been quietly building on it ever since. I would like to see the invoice.

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.