Beer and ice cream are two of summer's greatest pleasures.
But you wouldn't just drop a scoop of mint chip into your pale ale.
You should, however, trust one of the nation's best ice cream shops to concoct a lineup of beer ice creams, thereby achieving the perfect summertime synergy just in time for increasing temps and pool season.
The Salt & Straw Brewer's Series features a flight of five new flavors, each incorporating a different beer from a different U.S.-based microbrewery. It launched today in-stores and online via nationwide shipping and will remain available through June.
The series has something for everyone, enlisting a porter, stout, lager, ale and hazy IPA. But it turns out that creating a beer-infused ice cream isn't quite as simple as combining beer and ice cream.
According to Salt & Straw co-founder and head ice cream maker Tyler Malek, beer’s flavor isn’t concentrated enough to stand up to the ice cream’s high fat content. And trying to cook the beer to intensify its flavor only distorts the beer's character. Instead, he had to figure out how to deconstruct each beer and put it back together into sweet, creamy form, so that the brewer’s original beer is accurately reflected in each scoop. His hard work is your gain.
These are the five flavors you're working with, with notes on each brewery and how the ice creams are made.
Salt & Straw Brewer's Series
Métier's Black Stripe Porter & Bread Pudding
Métier Brewing in Seattle is one of the country’s only black-owned breweries, and has become the archetype of how breweries can build community for beer. Tyler boils three different types of malts, one type of barley, and toasted-coconut, then steeps the mixture with additional hops to create an ultra-concentrated syrup. This syrup becomes an unfiltered coconut beer, similar to beer wort, that replicates the flavor profile of Métier's Black Stripe Porter. It's then added to the ice cream base and combined with Seattle restaurateur Donna Moodie’s famous gooey bread pudding and crispy toffee.
Breakside's Barrel-Aged Chocolate Stout
Breakside Brewery is an award-winning microbrewery in Portland, Oregon. Tyler worked with head brewer Ben Edmunds for a custom barrel-aged beer, named Shasta Taffy, for this flavor. The beer is steeped with cocoa nibs for four days, which are then dried out and folded into chocolate to create a chocolate bark. The steeped beer is added into the ice cream base, swirled with the chocolate bark, and combined with a housemade tres leches cake swirl that's made with two leches, plus the stout as the third liquid.
Russian River’s Supplication Ale w/ Manchego
Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa, California, is a pioneer in creating hoppy and Belgian-inspired beers. Their Supplication Ale is aged for 12 months and comes out only once each year. This sour brown ale is aged in pinot noir barrels with sour cherries, and Tyler blends it into a light fudge, swirled with a touch of three month aged manchego cheese and a ribbon of tart-cherry marmalade. The flavor is inspired by a beer and cheese pairing.
Monkish's Space Cookies & Cream Hazy IPA
Monkish Brewing is an Asian-owned, all-Belgian brewery based in Torrance, California, and it's one of the first places on the West Coast to create a hazy IPA. Tyler uses their Space Cookies beer, which tastes like ‘nilla wafers, replicating it in ice cream form by creating a hops simple syrup. That's combined with a citrus syrup made with fresh grapefruit and orange zest, mimicking the flavors of the IPA, and swirled with ‘nilla wafer cookie butter.
La Tropical's La Original Lager w/ Guava
La Tropical originally started in Cuba and went dormant for 60 years after the revolution before reopening in Miami's Wynwood district in 2020. Tyler creates a refreshingly tropical ice cream with their 150-year-old Cuban Ambar Lager recipe, with a homemade flan and a sweet guava drizzle, and underlying notes of honey.
