Homer Simpson would love this beer-flavored ice cream

THE SCOOP

Collaboration between Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa and Salt & Straw creates an eclectic line of brew-based treats

Owners at Salt & Straw recently teamed with well-known breweries nationwide to kick off summer with a line of beer-flavored ice creams. COURTESY OF SALT & STRAW

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By John Metcalfe

jmetcalfe@bayareanewsgroup.com

If Homer Simpson were tapped to develop a new dessert, it might be something like this line of beer-flavored ice creams.

Salt & Straw is a Portland-based company known for creating off-the-wall ice cream — it’s dabbled with blue cheese, sea urchin, potato salad and smoked Oregon ham — but its Brewers Series sounds like something people actually might enjoy putting in their mouth.

There are five flavors (porter, stout, lager, ale and hazy IPA) corresponding to five beers from famous microbreweries across the U.S., including Russian River Brewing right here in Santa Rosa.

The ice cream is meant not so much to taste like drinking a foamy, hoppy beer, but rather to deconstruct the flavor profiles of each delicious brew and then add an extra food-based pairing.

For the Russian River selection, for example, the ice cream blends Supplication Ale — a year-aged beer that comes out once a year — with fudge, Manchego cheese and cherry marmalade. The end result, says the company, is a “fresh and tangy flavor.”

The other breweries Salt & Straw collaborated with are Monkish Brewing in Torrance, Breakside Brewery in Portland, Métier Brewing in Seattle and Cerveceria La Tropical in Miami. The flavors will be on offer through the month of June in shops around the Bay Area, from San Ramon to Palo Alto, as well as nationwide and via mail order. Here are the other beer ice creams:

Black-owned Métier Brewing is showcased in a Black Stripe Porter & Bread Pudding ice cream created by Salt & Straw co-founder Tyler Malek, who combined the brewery’s Black Stripe Coconut Porter with Seattle restaurateur Donna Moodie’s gooey bread pudding and crispy toffee.

For Breakside’s Barrel-Aged Chocolate Stout, Malek worked with award-winning Breakside Brewery’s head brewer, Ben Edmunds, on a custom beer for this flavor. Cocoa nibs are steeped in barrel-aged stout, then coated in chocolate. The combination (plus cream and sugar, of course) is swirled with a tres leches cake — or rather a dos-leches-and-stout cake.

Monkish’s Space Cookies & Cream Hazy IPA is made with Monkish’s Space Cookies beer, fresh grapefruit zest and Nilla wafer cookie butter.

And La Tropical’s La Original Lager w/ Guava combines La Tropical’s 150-year-old recipe for Cuban Ambar lager recipe, flan and guava.

Find Salt & Straw scoop shops at City Center Bishop Ranch in San Ramon and Westfield Valley Fair in San Jose, as well as in Burlingame, Palo Alto, Los Gatos and other locations; https://saltandstraw.com/.