The Beer Snob's Beer Reviews

Bravo Gelato Nashville started making gelato using Yazoo Brewing Company‘s beers with their Onward Stout.  I liked this, and it kind of resembled a Yazoo stout float to me…beer-y and rich and creamy.  Knowing they wanted to do a gelato using the Yazoo Hefeweizen, I suggested they make it with a mild banana gelato base.  They took the idea and ran with it, and the resulting gelato was well received and excellent.  (Read my review of Bravo Gelato’s Banana/Yazoo Hefeweizen gelato.) 

For their next collaboration with Yazoo, they wanted to use the Sly Rye Porter.  I suggested they use a tart cherry gelato to mix with the Sly Rye Porter, and they came up with an amarena cherry gelato.  I don’t believe they could have made a better choice.  Before I finally got a chance to try their porter gelato, I actually tried amarena cherry gelato in Greece, and it was amazing!  (Note: according to RecipeZaar.com, amarena cherries are small, dark, slightly sour cherries grown mostly in Bologna and Modena.)  The gelato itself was somewhat sour, but when you got an actual cherry in a bite, the sourness went way up.  The sourness is a great sort of sourness though, sour and fruity, almost like the sourness of a good Belgian ale.

Now on to the porter gelato.   With the addition of the porter, the gelato is a light beige color with pink/red undertones.  When I first tried it, I thought it was good but I thought it was too subtle in the flavors.  The trick with this gelato, though, like a good beer, is to let it warm to bring out the flavors.  Cold gelato just out of the freezer will freeze your taste buds and keep you from really experiencing the flavors.  You also want to take a good whiff as well, to smell the beer in the gelato.

When this warms a good bit, to a very soft consistency with a tiny bit of it melting into a puddle in the container, the flavors come to the forefront.  You definitely get cherry, but it’s not really sour until you get a piece of cherry, and even then the sourness is subtle.  But you also get some flavors from the porter.  The slightly smoky and malty porter pairs extremely well with the cherry.  Linus Hall, owner of Yazoo, said this was the best one yet (I think he also said that about the banana/Hefeweizen gelato!)  and he is right.  The pairing of the cherry and the porter is spot on! 

These beer gelatos (gelatoes?) are great, not just because they taste awesome, but because you first taste the gelato as a whole, then you get to deconstruct the flavors into their individual components (cherry and beer, in this case), appreciate the individual flavors, and then better appreciate the way the flavors merge together and complement each other.

Noel at Bravo Gelato Nashville is looking forward towards the next collaboration, and I’m looking forward to it as well.  I hope I can continue to make suggestions and see them come to such tasty fruition!  Well done, Noel!

The Beer Snob