Salted Caramel Brownie Brown Ale
Three weeks in and you’re rotating ice cream and whiskey at eleven in the morning. The Notebook is on its fourth viewing. You’re not sure if you’re sad anymore or just committed to the performance.
Ben & Jerry’s made a beer. New Belgium brewed it. Salted Caramel Brownie Brown Ale, six percent alcohol, all the sweet brownie and caramel notes you’d get from ice cream but in a form that actually gets you drunk. It’s stupid but it works.
The beer tastes good, which is somehow worse than if it tasted like shit. If it was terrible you could write it off as a corporate cash grab. But it’s genuinely interesting, and the ABV is high enough to actually do something, so you end up buying a six-pack and then another six-pack. You’re not eating through a pint of ice cream anymore, you’re drinking through their beer, and the effect is about the same except you can pretend it’s more sophisticated.
Here’s the thing that got me: they added salt to the recipe. Salt in the beer. But if you’re the person this product is designed for, you’re already providing enough salt. Your tears are handling the seasoning. You don’t need them to engineer it in.