Michael Kupferberg with his Crunchy Peanut Butter beer ice cream. Photos: Melkbos.net and Facebook
If you’ve got a sweet tooth, and a beer tooth, you’ve got to try West Coast Beer Ice Cream. It’s velvety, creamy and subtle. It offers heady delights, although the alcohol has been cooked away.
The beer ice cream is the brain child of Melkbosstrand business manager Mike Kupferberg. Its slogan is “Ice cream with a difference, brew!” And it’s true. What’s also true is that only the lucky few have tasted it. At the moment it is only served at the Bistro on Beach here in Melkbosstrand and at Darling Brewery – and there it is served periodically.
Fab Five
Supply is limited. Kupferberg and his beloved Kirsten Bezuidenhout make the range that consists of five flavours themselves, after work.
Up close and personal with the Crunchy Peanut Butter.
They use only Darling Brew Black Mist, fine ingredients, no preservatives, and a gas stove. The process takes two days. Before they bought their ice cream machine in September 2016, it took five full days. In a busy season they make 8-12 litres per week. Over December they pushed themselves and made 18 litres per week for Darling Brewery.
What sparked the idea?
The idea for the ice cream came to Kupferberg one evening after having a few beers and a motivational talk with his brother. “I came up with the recipe the next week,” Kupferberg says, smiling. But that was just the beginning. It took a year-and-half for him to come up with “the right recipe,” and the tasty trials and experiments really lasted three years in all.
Tweaked recipe 10-15 times
The first ice cream batch was made on Kupferberg’s mom’s gas stove, and she loved it. He remembers it as having too many crystals, and reminding him of sorbet. She remembers it fondly and still asks for it. Kupferberg tweaked the recipe ten to fifteen times before he was satisfied with it.
He says, “I had a vision and I stuck with it. I knew my recipe had to change and become as perfect as the beer.” He is of course talking about Darling Brew Black Mist.
That dark ale
Kupferberg uses only this one dark ale in his ice cream. He says it works very well with food pairing. “You’re getting the taste of the ice cream, but there is an aftertaste, as if you have had a craft beer.”
The ice cream is much better than that, actually. It’s subtle and luxurious and creamy. It’s not too sweet, but the chunks of peanut butter in the Peanut Butter Crunch make for “an explosion” in your mouth, to quote Kupferberg.
One can choose from five flavours at the moment. Original (vanilla flavour), Peanut Butter, Crunchy Peanut Butter, Chocolate (hazelnut flavour) and French Rock (wafer and hazelnut chocolate). The latter is so good that Kupferberg describes it romantically as a “French affair.”
Mike Kupferberg and Kirsten Bezuidenhout.
Suffice it to say that the whole range of beer ice cream is so good that when Kupferberg and his beloved took samples for an ice cream tasting to Darling Brewery the owners put in an order on the spot.
Beer ice cream aficionados can contact Mike Kupferberg on Westcoastbeericecream@gmail.com.
