Cocktail Fail

Some of you may know, I contribute to a beer blog called Chicks that Dig Beer.  Last week I created a Caramel Ale Ice Cream that is absolutely amazing.  It has a delicate beer flavor brought out by a smooth caramel foundation.  I considered it a success.  It was so good, it kept coming to mind.  I couldn’t shake the thought that it had even more potential.  But, as what?  An accompaniment to a warm, winter root salad?  By pouring even more caramel over it?  I settled on what I always settle on. I got out the cocktail glasses. 

Beer Ice Cream Cocktail.  Sounds good.    The liquor cabinet was overflowing with possibility, following an over-indulgent trip to Surdyks.  Not to mention a miasma of half bottles.  Jewel toned schnapps in various faux flavors, most of which needed to be run under a hot faucet to be opened.  I began easy.  Vodka and ice cream.  Meah. It just wasn’t quite right.  Then, I tried whisky.  Still not it.  Each new concoction was pouring into two gleaming low balls that were whisked into the living room for my husband and I to try together.  Each one was followed by mutual looks of apathy and sometimes distain.  The glasses were politely discarded on the marble coffee table and I’d trot (or slink) back to the dining room.  Sounds of contemplation where followed by the clamor of ice in an aluminum cocktail shaker.

I tried to keep up hope.  This was just a tricky one.  I would need to think out of the box.  I tried all sorts of liquors and every mixer imaginable to compliment my wonderful ale ice cream.  Most of them overpowered the delicate beer flavor.  Some of them led to wiping our tongues on our sleeves to remove the taste…or texture… that had invaded out mouths.  There was a blueberry vodka contrivance that tasted like drinking beer out of a Caboodle that once stored erasers.  Soon, the living room began to fill with half drank, pungent glasses of separated booze and cream.  Some rimmed with sugar, all of them sticky.  Like a limousine after prom. 

Once we got over the house smelling like Lindsey Lohan hawking kettle corn for beer money, we did find one that we tolerated.  By tolerated, I mean we didn’t involuntarily re-open our mouths and let it fall out onto the rug… or the passing dog.  By this point, the subject was moot.  I had run out of ice cream.

The moral of this story:  Though happy people see potential in all their surroundings, not everything was meant to be a cocktail.