You always hear about amazing and interesting things coming out of Colorado in the craft beer world. Mavyn Holman, owner of Brew Moo’d LLC, is proprietor of one such innovation. Holman is the creator and owner of the Brew Moo’d Craft Beer Infused Ice Cream, and with a wide variety of flavors already available, reading about the boozy dessert treats will have you flocking to Colorado.
Holman shared with The Outcask the creative process behind concocting the beer infused ice cream and the short and long term plans. Holman works with a variety of local breweries to bring out the best flavors in both beer and ice cream. The result is a win-win for each party. Delicious dessert with a boozy punch.
The gang is all together.
How did Brew Moo’d Craft Beer Infused Ice Cream get its start?
A friend and I had been discussing starting a beer-based business for a couple years and kicked the idea around over many a good craft brew as we visited the various tap rooms along the Front Range in CO. Initially the idea was to combine our love of high quality, locally brewed craft beer and dessert! While there is an abundance of liquor-based confections available, we noticed a distinct lack of beer-focused options and set out to right this wrong. Originally, our plan was to focus on baked goods and possibly beer floats.
I’m an engineer and formulating chemist by day and enjoy applying that approach to cooking and baking. I began adapting liquor infused dessert recipes to use beer instead – a really fun challenge. I tried a carrot cake with Odell’s Easy Street Wheat, a chocolate mouse with Odell’s Lugene Milk Stout, a dark chocolate stout bunt cake with Twisted Pine’s Bourbon Stout (a special), a honey beer spice cake with cream cheese frosting and roasted, salted nuts (both cake and frosting were infused with Easy Street Wheat) and finally, an Oatmeal Stout cake with apples using Breckinridge’s Oatmeal Stout. The oatmeal stout cake was intended to be served with a whisky infused whipped cream. However, I’ve been an ice cream fanatic since childhood. My Great Uncle was a Professor of Dairy Science at Penn State. Every time we visited State College, we would go to the creamery and bring back containers of the ice cream to Maryland on dry ice. I’ve been making ice cream at home ever since. So, for the oatmeal stout cake, I decided to try to make a beer infused ice cream instead of the whisky infused cream for the topping. I used Bonfire Brewing’s Tentpole Whisky Porter for the ice cream.
We tested out the creations on a group of friends. Everyone agreed that while the baked goods were delicious, you couldn’t really taste the beer. The ice cream, on the other hand, was not only truly yummy, but also really conveyed the flavor of the beer. So, we decided to focus on beer ice cream and Brew Moo’d was born. We also decided to focus on using locally sourced beers for our flavor inspirations.
Is it available at your shop or is it distributed? If not, do you plan on distributing it?
We currently sell wholesale only and do not have our own retail location.
When did you start making these ice creams?
The first experimental batches were made in the winter of 2014. Brew Moo’d was officially incorporated in October 2014.
How does Brew Moo’d decide on what flavors to use?
It’s a tough process – we taste a lot of beer. We try to imagine how well each beer’s characteristics could be leveraged into ice cream in a unique and pleasing way. We also like to work closely with the brewers to try to understand how they have built their beers and which flavor notes they are working to bring through. This is often the jumping off point for which additional elements (if any) to add to the ice cream to be able to best enhance the original character of the beer. We also look to traditional ice cream flavors and then identify beers that would best complement them. For our initial product line, we wanted to have a diverse range of flavors that spanned a wide variety of beers. We knew that just as people have different beer preferences, this was likely to translate to different preferences for beer-based ice cream as well.
The biggest issue we have with flavor selection is that there are far too many beers and flavor combinations that we’d like to work with and just not enough time to develop them all at once.
Espresso Stout
Does the ice cream making process preserve the beers alcoholic content?
It preserves a potion of the content. The ABV for our current line of flavors ranges from 0.6% – 1.5%.
What flavors do you have available?
Current Commercial Flavors:
- Raspberry Wheat Chocolate Chip – Premium sweet cream ice cream infused with Twisted Pine’s Raspberry Wheat beer and loaded with dark chocolate chunks.
- Witbier Grapefruit Shandy Sherbet – A twist on a classic summer shandy. Twisted Pine’s Twisted Wit combined with a grapefruit lemonade.
- Agaveras IPA – Premium sweet cream ice cream infused with Twisted Pine’s Agaveras IPA.
- Espresso Stout Toffee Crunch – Premium sweet cream ice cream infused with Twisted Pine’s Big Shot Espresso Stout and loaded with chocolate covered toffee bits.
- Killah Chocolate – Mexican dark chocolate ice cream infused with Twisted Pine’s Ghost Face Killah chili beer.
- Root Beer – Old-fashioned root beer ice cream.
Agaveras IPA
Soon to be available:
- Saison Raisin Walnut – Premium sweet cream ice cream infused with Sanitas Brewing’s Saison and loaded with Saison soaked raisins and walnuts.
- Black IPA Chocolate Chip – Premium sweet cream ice cream infused with Sanitas Brewing’s Black IPA and loaded with dark chocolate chunks.
What are your plans for Brew Moo’d ice creams?
For the short term, we plan to expand the availability of our current line of flavors (check out our Facebook page for new locations). We also plan to work with additional breweries to expand our flavor lines and will be adding seasonal flavors as we enter the Fall and Winter months.
They are available locally in Boulder Colorado, but are there hopes to bring Brew Moo’d to a wider customer range?
We will be staying local for now as longer range distribution of an ice cream product involves a larger infrastructure than we have planned for the near future.
Since we can’t taste it, can you describe the flavors?
Ghost Face Killah
All the flavors start with super premium ice cream and are rich and very creamy. We work very hard to try to preserve the original character of each beer we use. Our goal is bring the flavor profile of each beer through in a pleasing way and to allow it to be the main backbone of each flavor, not just because it’s a novel concept to incorporate beer into ice cream.
When you first taste the ice cream, you will get some aroma from the beer – especially from some of the stronger flavors. The initial flavor that comes through is typically the sweeter and more traditional component of each flavor – the raspberry for the Raspberry Wheat, the agave for the IPA, the espresso for the Espresso Stout, etc. Next, the maltiness and more of the beer profile builds. Finally, the hops come through as the cold ice cream sits on the back of your tongue. For the hoppier flavors (like the IPA), the hops are allowed to come through unchecked. For other flavors, the added ingredients (the dark chocolate in the Raspberry wheat and the chocolate covered toffee in the Espresso Stout) serve to enhance the flavor of the beer and also balance out the hops flavor at the end.
In terms of the specific flavors, the Raspberry Wheat is the mildest flavor. You get a definite fruity, raspberry ice cream flavor initially, followed by a slight maltiness through the middle and then a subtle hops flavor at the end balanced by the dark chocolate.
Raspberry Wheat
The Witbier Grapefruit Shandy Sherbet is incredibly refreshing. The base beer, Twisted Wit, is brewed with grapefruit and bitter orange peel along with coriander. We combine it with grapefruit lemonade to enhance the grapefruit element in the beer and give the shandy a bit of tartness. As it is a sherbet, with low dairy content, the beer flavor comes through very cleanly.
The Agaveras IPA starts off very creamy and mellow with sweetness from the agave nectar. Again, it is more malty through the middle until the hops kick in assertively at the end – proving it is truly an IPA at heart.
The Espresso Stout with Toffee Chunks is probably the flavor people are most drawn to initially as I think it is easier to imagine how it would taste. The initial taste is of coffee, followed by the rich, chocolaty, roasty maltiness of the stout, ending in a bit of hops balanced by the chocolate covered toffee bits.
The Killah Chocolate is a different type of flavor. It is a Mexican dark chocolate ice cream with chilies, cinnamon and a touch of vanilla. All the chili flavor in this very spicy ice cream is imparted to the ice cream by the ghost chilies contained in the Ghost Face Killah beer. The initial flavor is of an extremely rich, dark chocolate ice cream followed by a touch of the cinnamon and finally the smoked chilies, which sneaks up on you at the end and then continues to build long after the bite is gone.
Our Root Beer IceCcream is based on our own root beer recipe and evokes the flavor of an old-fashioned root beer float.
Do you plan on fusing the ice cream with cider or any other alcoholic beverage?
We plan to keep beer as our main focus. However, we are currently kicking around some ideas for ice cream flavors with a local winery. So, we may actually have some really unique wine-based offerings in the near future. Cider would be really fun as well in the future.
Do you make ice cream that is gluten-free, vegan, lactose intolerant? Or have plans to?
Currently, the Root Beer Ice Cream is the only option we have that does not contain gluten (it is still manufactured on shared equipment with products that contain gluten, however). In the future, we would like to work with some gluten-free beers so that we will have more offerings along those lines. All of our current products also contain dairy – including the sherbet. Down the line, we may introduce some dairy-free options.
Will you be at any upcoming festivals?
We were featured at Twisted Pine Brewery’s 20th Anniversary party in July. We do not have any festivals currently on the books as we are currently very focused on our production scale-up. We are hoping to be able to get out and reach more folks through festivals in the near future.
