Stout floats

I poke through the new recipes on epicurious.com pretty frequently, and came across one for Guinness-based ice cream floats a couple of weeks ago. I love Guinness, I love vanilla ice cream... sure, I'll give that a try. There's even a pretty picture accompanying the recipe to suck me in further.

There was a bad review... I wrote it off as someone who likes beer but maybe isn't used to drinking Guinness. I got a weird face from someone at work when I told her I was thinking about making this... still, I believed that this was going to be delightful.

Epicurious does me wrong SO VERY RARELY, and I want to make that clear. I love them. I urge all bacon lovers to try out their Sweet and Spicy Bacon recipe, which is like heaven on earth. It takes the basic idea behind dipping bacon in maple syrup and takes it to the next logical step. I can't keep a batch around for longer than 24 hours (which is part of why I try not to make it often, because I have this notion that eating a pound of bacon in a day isn't all that healthy).

The stout floats didn't come out so well. And here's the problem. Ice cream floats should be sweet. Guinness is very bitter, coming in between 45-60 on the IBU scale. Guinness works in something like a chocolate stout cake, where there's some flavor complexity to offset the bitterness. It does NOT work when the only sweetness in the dessert is coming from vanilla ice cream, even premium vanilla ice cream. You just end up with ice cream that tastes bitter. Bleh. Lesson learned.

However, now I'm wondering if a combo of a hefeweizen and lemon sorbet or ice cream would work...