Cult Cookie Conditions on Actual Cookies, Not Cookie Flavoring

Most cookie beers are built from flavoring. Hitchhiker's new 10.5 percent milkshake stout is conditioned on chocolate and vanilla cookies themselves, which is a slower and considerably messier way to get there.

• Style: Chocolate Milkshake Imperial Stout w/ Cookies
• Release Date: 2026-10-02
• ABV: 10.5%
• Hitchhiker Brewing Co. (Pittsburgh, PA)

Cult Cookie is new this week, and it is the biggest thing in the release. Hitchhiker Brewing Co.'s chocolate milkshake imperial stout comes in at 10.5 percent, brewed with oats and milk sugar and conditioned on chocolate and vanilla cookies.

That last detail is the one that separates this from most beers with a cookie on the label. Cookie character in beer usually arrives as flavoring, added in measured doses with predictable results. Conditioning means the actual cookies went into the tank with the finished beer and sat there. It is a slower approach and a less controllable one, since what comes out depends on what the cookies give up rather than on a dosing rate.

The rest of the build is classic milkshake stout. Milk sugar, or lactose, is the defining ingredient of the category for a straightforward reason: brewer's yeast cannot ferment it, so all of it stays in the finished beer as sweetness and body. Oats add the viscosity that gives the style its name. Together they produce the thick, rounded texture that keeps a stout this strong from reading as hot or thin, and they give the chocolate and vanilla something substantial to sit on.

The brewery lists Cult Cookie as an occasional release rather than a rotating one, which puts it among the less frequent beers in the lineup.

Cult Cookie is available for online ordering now in cans, with pick-up beginning Friday, October 2 at Hitchhiker's Mt. Lebanon and Sharpsburg taprooms.