Craig's Cookies Stout Aims at One Cookie, Not the Idea of One

Side Launch teamed up with Toronto's Craig's Cookies on a 5.5 percent stout built to taste like one particular chocolate chip cookie. The brewery describes malt sweetness, cacao and baked-cookie notes. It is at the LCBO now.

• Style: Baked Fresh Chocolate Chip Stout
• Release Date: 2026-09-29
• ABV: 5.5%
• Side Launch Brewing Co. (Collingwood, ON)

A dessert beer normally borrows a flavour in the abstract. This one borrowed a recipe with an address.

Side Launch Brewing Co. has released Craig's Cookies Stout, a 5.5 percent collaboration with the Toronto bakery chain Craig's Cookies. The brewery's own designation for the style is a Baked Fresh Chocolate Chip Stout, and it is in 473ml cans at the LCBO now.

Side Launch describes a rich stout that brings together smooth malt sweetness, cacao and baked cookie notes, built in the image of Craig's classic chocolate chip cookie. The product listing puts oats and wheat in the grain bill alongside barley, and notes natural flavouring.

That grain bill is the practical half of the idea. Oats are the usual route to the thick, rounded body a dessert stout needs, and they are doing the work that a raw pastry-stout approach would hand to lactose instead. Cacao is the other half. Chocolate malt gives roast and bitterness, closer to coffee than confection, so reaching for cacao alongside it is what tilts the beer toward the soft, sweet end of chocolate rather than the dark, dry end.

The target is checkable

The framing here is more specific than most beers in this category attempt. A cookie stout is a familiar enough proposition, and it usually means the general notion of a cookie - vanilla, brown sugar, a bit of biscuit. Naming a particular bakery's particular cookie sets a reference point that a drinker can actually go and taste. Craig's Cookies has been trading on chocolate chip cookies in Toronto since 2013 and operates several shops around the city, so the comparison is available to a fair number of the people who will buy this.

Whether it lands is a question for the glass, and Side Launch is the source for the flavour claims rather than JollyPint. But a stated target that can be verified is a different kind of claim from one that cannot, and it is the more interesting way to build a collaboration beer.

Side Launch is framing it as autumn and winter drinking. Something roasty and sweet at 5.5 percent would sit well after a meal, or next to vanilla ice cream if the cookie theme is worth following all the way through.

Craig's Cookies Stout is available now at the LCBO, in six, twelve and twenty-four can formats. Side Launch operates out of Collingwood and London, Ontario.