I’m sure it’s apparent to you all that we’re in the midst of summer, with the stinking hot humid days that that brings in Auckland. If you’re reading this column, you are probably also already well aware of the joy of a nice cold beer on a sunny afternoon, like those we’ve been enjoying lately. So rather than dwell on this well known (but still awesome) way to enjoy beer, I thought I’d look at some of the other ways to enjoy beer on a hot day.

One of my friends recently tried making beer popsicles, I guess in a manner not too dissimilar to the wine popsicle familiar to Black Books fans. Unfortunately, the beer used was Heineken, which focuses more on bitter flavours than sweet, and as such I gather that the results were not overly palatable. However, the beer popsicle idea is not without its merits, and I believe that if a sweeter, maltier beer such as a stout or perhaps some Belgian abbey style beers were to be used, they could be quite delicious. Perhaps this could be expanded to things like beer slushies.

A more successful experiment (at least in my experience) is beer ice cream. I’ve tried and enjoyed a few examples of this now, although they’ve tended to use rather generic beers like Mac’s Gold or Speights. So when my girlfriend discovered a recipe for gingerbread and Trappist ale ice cream, I knew that we just HAD to try making it.

For our attempt at the recipe we used Chimay Red, which is quite malty and sweet but with some nice spicy complexity to the flavour. This was combined with cream, sugar, egg yolks and a large range of spices commonly used in gingerbread. Before freezing and churning we added chopped up crystallised ginger just to add a little more zing. The resultant ice cream was rather delicious, although being an American recipe we could have perhaps lowered the sugar content a little. I’d certainly recommend trying it, especially while the weather is fine.