Project Beer Sorbet

After the epic BEEFAIL of the Otter Creek Raspberry Brown Winter Ale, the Ohabeer HQ found itself in possession of four bottles we were NEVER going to drink. As we are far too frugal of folks to simply pour this down the drain, we started tossing about ideas. Mrs. Ohabeer had just completed her first chocolate sorbet (she has been working on a variety of ice creams for a while now) and we thought…

BEER SORBET!

And so Oh…a beer Project Beer Sorbet was born.

Most of the recipes for beer sorbet we encountered called for a hard cider or lambic. That seemed too easy. You are still essentially using fruit juice when making sorbet with cider or lambic. We wanted beer sorbet.

We figured, the raspberry in the Otter Creek would provide a fruit tone for our intro sorbet and the sugar in the simple syrup would kill the nastiness of the BEERFAIL after taste.

Experiment 01: Otter Creek Raspberry Brown Winter Ale

Once the base was made, it is poured into the ice cream freezer and churned for 25 minutes. An explanation for not providing the base recipe will be coming at the end of this article. (You can skip ahead if you want…I’ll wait for you to come back…)

On the left, the frozen sorbet slurry ready to go into the freezer. We chose to freeze this overnight to give it the maximum time to set up. On the right is the result. We made the mistake of taking a taste at 10am on a Sunday morning before coffee or breakfast. Probably not the best way to judge.

Our initial thought: too sweet and not enough beer flavor. Though it did kill the nasty chemical BEERFAIL taste of the original brew.

So, I decided to wait until later in the day. After brunch and some working around the Ohabeer HQ. Decided to settle in around 5pm for a little happy hour and another tasting.

I got out one of out ice cream/sorbet bowls and dished up a scoop. You can see on the left that the crystals are nice and uniform. The texture on the spoon was fairly decent for a frist round. On the right, however, you can see a hint of the problem to come. Look carefully at the bottom of the bowl. That little bit of moisture is the sorbet melting after only about 15 seconds in the bowl.

Unfortunately, the melting got even worse as I continued eating. It literally fell apart simply from the heat of my hand holding the bowl.

The texture was quite nice. Smooth and clean without any major icyness. There really was not any strong beer taste through it definitely has a small kick. We did not heat the beer – so this is an alcoholic sorbet.

Results of Round 01
The two failures in this first round are:

1. Not a strong enough beer taste
2. Sorbet is not stable

#1 will be solved in the next round by using Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout. It’sa big beer andwe should be able to get a better fix on the flavor. Also – and this is something that concerned us from the start – using bad beer (or wine) is most likely going to lead to a bad sorbet. We took the risk with the Otter Creek as we wanted to find a use. That will not happen again. Moving forward, it will be a series based off quality drinkable beers.

#2 arises out of both sugar and alcohol acting as anti-freeze. We will need to find a balance that adds some sweetness – not as much as this round – while providing enough water to not dilute the beer flavor but counterbalance the anti-freeze effect.

We have a few plans in the works and we’ll let you know what happens in our next installment.