October 19, 2009 – It’s Good For What Ales Ya!

A while back, when we were in Bar Harbor, we visited a brewery. While there we bought some root beer, a six pack of their “Real Ale”, some blueberry soda and a six pack of their “Blueberry Ale”. Over the course of our travels, we partook of the Real Ale and the Blueberry Ale. We gave Christy some root beer on our last visit. We had yet to crack open a blueberry soda. Somewhere else, possibly VA or NC, we bought some blueberry ripple ice cream on a grocery shopping trip. It was still in the freezer.

We stopped for a pizza dinner on our way home from the “World of Coca-Cola” museum today. With the excess pizza boxed, the bill paid, the tip left, we were back on the road to the campground. Carol commented we had enough ice cream left to fix a couple of Blueberry floats. That sounded really good; blueberry ripple ice cream with blueberry soda. Once home, I grabbed a bottle from where we had the sodas in storage and brought it into the coach. Carol, returning from walking with Spice, saw the bottle and placed it into the freezer to cool it down quickly. I gave it about 15 minutes then grabbed the ice cream and the now cold bottle to make floats. Two glasses, two scoops of ice cream in each, pop open the bottle and began to pour. As the concoction foamed up in the first glass, I began to pour the second. With both of them foamed, I sipped some of the foam off the first. It didn’t have the blueberry taste I expected. I gave the bottle a quick glance with part of thumb blocking the label. It says “blueberry”, it must be “OK”. I poured some more into the first and then sipped some foam from the second. Again, there was that strange taste. I reexamined the bottle’s label. What I assumed my thumb had covered was the word soda. On second look, the word was Ale. I had just made to Blueberry Ale floats. And if you have any doubts then let me reassure you: Ale and ice cream do not, DO NOT, go together. It was now painfully obvious that we had not consumed all of the Blueberry Ale. Armed with a real soda, we drained the ale off of the ice cream and replaced it with the soda. The soda was sufficiently strong to over ride the flavor of the ale, so no harm done. Other then a good ale went to waste.