more ice cream for the coming summer

So, the beer floats just keep cropping up and I keep drinking them.  This time it's a tasting at El Sainete, downtown.  It's a very modern looking place, with several levels and 18 taps of craft beer, so things are promising.  I got there early, worried about how public transportation would be during Pride, so I had a pre-cata caña.  One of the beers was a Czech pilsner which I hadn't heard of before, so that temptation was impossible to pass up.  I only had a caña, 20cl, but it was €2.  I found the prices for quantities of less than a pint to be bit high, although that's fairly common.  Kout na Šumavě Koutská desítka pilsner I found to be light, bubbly, and only a little bitter.  It has a rather herbal flavor actually.  The sweetness evaporates in a moment, but that small bitterness hangs around for a while.  It's a tongue twister of a beer, in that it leaves a mark.

First we had Firestone Union Jack IPA with mango ice cream, which was much like the All Day mango at Toast Tavern.  We tried the beer by itself first.  Union Jack is a bit smoky, but hoppy in smell.  The taste is light, however, and the bitterness doesn't come out until the aftertaste.  When mixed the drink looks like a fresh squeezed orange juice.  As for the taste, the mango dominates, it's fruity, sweetish, and the bitterness has been conquered.  It's much creamier than what I had in Toast Tavern, since I didn't mix that one up.

Action pour!

For some reason I didn't get a picture of the ice cream

The second sample was a lambic, but not one of the fruit ones that we find all over.  Geuze Boon is a simple naturally fermented beer without added fruit, but the ice cream for the float was a snappy, tart raspberry.  The beer has a bitter smell, a little skunky, in fact.  The taste is cidery, sour, even grabby, but becomes sweet in the aftertaste.  The ice cream provoked a few eruptions, but with a little less beer I didn't have that problem with my glass.  Mixed, it resembles strawberry juice or a milkshake but with foam.  The taste is more beery, more bitter and less fruity, but it is very much like a fruit lambic.  Morte Subite was mentioned by more than one of us.  Even when the foam goes down the drink is foamy in appearance, and with a little more lambic than half the mix it's sourer and better in my opinion.

Very foamy

Beeruption!

Real raspberry, with seeds

Number three was Nómada's Manchurina gose, another sour beer.  Gose is a ... special sort.  It's not the bitter or grassy kind of beer we come across most often, it has another character.  I find it carnivorous.  It smells like deli meats, with smokiness, saltiness and a touch of bacon.  The additive was chocolate ice cream, which caused a few eruptions, but was less disruptive than the lambic.  Blended, it looks like a chocolate milkshake or Colacao, but the taste isn't what you might expect.  It's sour, chocolatey, but with the lime of the gose quite noticeable.  Some people thought it was like a milkshake that had gone off in the fridge, and there is a taste that could be called simply "sour milk" there.  But it still smells like a butcher shop.

The craft ice cream store, if you're curious

Finally, we had a "classic" beer float, stout with vanilla ice cream.  The beer was actually an espresso stout, by the Japanese Hitachino.  There is some coffee in the beer itself, although it's a mix of coffee, salt and stout bitterness.  Some people mentioned soy sauce, but I wonder if that's just the psychology of a dark Japanese liquid.  Again, when adding the ice cream, the foam comes right to the top of the glass.  I was lucky that mine didn't go over.  The taste is sweet and chocolatey, but a little too sweet for me.  A little more beer, approaching two-thirds of the glass, is better, more like dark chocolate.  There's just a touch of sweet, a little caramel, a little cream, and towards the end there's a little licorice, but not enough to bother me.