Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage (or food) that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
Baseball season is over. Ice cream season? Friends, that never ends.
Sure, the nipping winds of November are a detriment to a frozen treat, but there’s no wrong time for ice cream. It’s something on which everyone but the lactose intolerant can agree.
Now, adding beer to that? That’s a bit more divisive.
Yet here Blue Moon is, pairing with Rawlings and Hardscoop to make a boozy ice cream inspired by the Valencia oranges endemic to the popular beer’s origin. The result is Blue Moon Home Run Twist, an infused orange-vanilla ice cream that clocks in at under two percent alcohol by volume (ABV) while attempting to capture the “born in a ballpark” spirit of the brew inside.
In the words of Ronald MacDonald (not that one): “Eating your drinks? That is genius!” Let’s see if it’s any good.
Blue Moon Home Run Twist: B
Opening the carton shows off an ice cream that looks just like orange sherbet. That citrus is the first thing you get from taking a sniff of the ice cream itself, but there’s a subtle malty current waiting below the surface. It smells, honestly, like a very nice summer beer.
That holds true through the first bite. You get bright orange zest — not quite sherbet levels, but enough to let you know where you’ve landed. That’s buoyed by vanilla, creating an easy win via creamsicle replication. You don’t taste the beer or the booze, which makes sense. At 1.9 percent ABV, you aren’t even getting a near-beer’s worth of alcohol.
If there’s one complaint, it’s how the process of freezing alcohol has messed with the ice cream’s texture. There’s a bit of slush to this, creating a granulated mouth feel that’s grainy and a little unpleasant.
Fortunately, it tastes great. Simple, but solid. There’s little connection to Blue Moon itself aside from the Valencia orange, but that’s fine. I’d prefer it to have a lighter touch than a heavier one.
And if you’re looking for a bigger boozy flavor, it’d probably make a decent beer float. I was about to dust that old chestnut out for this review before realizing, whoops, I’m fresh out of Blue Moon.
Would I (eat) it instead of a Hamm’s?
This is a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I eat Blue Moon Home Run Twist over a cold can of Hamm’s?
Look, I didn’t need a way to introduce *more* calories to my drinking. And at 1.9 percent ABV, I’d have to be Joey Chestnut to feel much of anything from this. It tastes good, but you can do better in the ice cream realm and better when it comes to booze.