I Fought the Law

Beer Ice Cream Tastes Like Beer in Ice Cream Form

A home-made ice cream parlour recently opened near our house, so last night Dr. M and I went over to check it out. Among the flavors available last night was something called "Beer Me," which I initially dared to assume was beer-flavored ice cream. I suspected, with some despair, that it might be root beer-flavored as opposed to proper beer-flavored, so I requested a sample. Sure enough, it was beer. With pretzel sticks in it (more on that later).

After some momentary hemming and hawing I decided to go with a full serving of the beer ice cream, since (1) I'm always interested in trying new and bizarre forms of junk food and (2) I've been a vanilla fan all my life and I've made it my business to branch out to other ice cream flavors.

So, the beer ice cream. It tasted like beer. Exactly like beer. Not high quality beer, of course, since it would be decidedly uneconomical to waste the good stuff on ice cream, but the taste was authentic nonetheless. I speculated, though didn't verify, that they actually used some sort of non-alcoholic beer to keep it family-friendly (though I probably wouldn't let my child eat beer ice cream, if only because he or she would probably hate it and I'd be hearing about it for the rest of the night). I won't say that the beer ice cream was a uniformly positive experience, but I also can't say that it wasn't good. I probably won't order it again, not because it was bad, but because when I'm in the mood for ice cream I want something smooth and sweet, not beer-you-can-eat-with-a-spoon. It would be like steak ice cream. I like steak, but when I want ice cream I don't want steak.

Also, the pretzel sticks, while somewhat clever and certainly ambitious, were a total dud. They added some nice saltiness to the flavor (which would have been more effective if the ice cream were decidedly sweet as opposed to beer-bitter), but the delivery mechanism consisted of small, intrusive bits of soggy bread. A valiant effort, local home-made ice cream shoppe, but better luck next time.

Dr. M went with chocolate chip, and concluded that the chip-to-ice cream ratio was far too high. It seemed like she was eating a cup of chocolate chips with some ice cream mixed in.

We will probably return, since the overall product was of high quality even if the specific flavor executions needed work. But we'll probably stick with the more garden-variety -- dare I say, vanilla -- flavors going forward.

Posted by hb at April 12, 2008 10:50 AM