Hey, Beer Jerk, Gimme a Dragon's Milk With a Tropical Iceberg

I used to love root beer floats. As a kid, I drank them all the time from the A&W down the street. Dang...I'm realizing right now that the last root beer float I had was consumed long before many of our current employees were born. That hurts.

So, what do you do when you're all growed up and you don't crave the sticky sweet sugar bomb of a soda, but you want to recapture the delightful exuberance of those yummy times? The answer, as usual, is alcohol: beer float!

New Holland's Dragon's Milk is a Strong Ale brewed in the style of ye olde English double ales. Back a couple hundred years ago, there was a strong beer brewed after the harvest in October when malt and hops were fresh and plentiful. It was a big deal: aged at least a year, and drunk on special occasions like weddings, births, etc. They had all kinds of silly names for this kind of beer, one of them being dragon's milk. (There's a nice article on the subject at All About Beer)

What we do over here at CapoPenn is we take this dark, malty, caramelly, oaky, vanilla-y beer--this beer that clocks in at 10%abv--and we drop in a dollop of either Coconut Milk or Dark Chocolate gelato. And what that does, see, is make a creamy statement in that glass of beer and kind of lightens the mood a bit, because a big, dark, barrel-aged strong ale in the middle of June could potentially be a bit of a challenge, okay? But here, you've got gelato in your beer, and it's just delightful! The coconut adds creaminess and echos the flavors of coconut that the whiskey barrel adds to the beer. The Dark Chocolate swirls around mysteriously and accentuates the beer's dark chocolate and roast malt flavors.

Come on in, belly up to the bar and indulge some childishness. I mean, only if you're an adult, 'cause Dragon's Milk packs a punch that cat beer

(soda jerk slang for cow's milk) does not.