(WJET/WFXP/YourErie.com) — Do you like ice cream? Do you like beer? If you answered “Yes” to both, then Casey’s Ice Cream and Candies has a flavor for you.

The Meadville homemade ice cream and candy store has teamed up with Voodoo Brewing Co. to offer a beer-flavored frozen treat. But hold on before you judge — it’s made with Voodoo Brewing Co.’s Cowbell Double Chocolate Imperial Milk Stout. Just reading the name, it seems obvious that it’s a match made in ice cream heaven.

“When you put that first spoonful of ice cream in your mouth, right away you can tell it’s beer ice cream. Then when you let it melt in your mouth, you begin to pick up a slight coffee taste and that leads to a chocolate taste, then the stout beer flavor,” said Shawn Sullivan, the owner of Casey’s Ice Cream and Candies. “You can really taste the different elements as they come through the beer.”

Sullivan has been making ice cream in Meadville since 1999. Before that, he had been making candy in the Pittsburgh area for 45 years. He’s also a beer connoisseur, if you will (“I’m a beer drinker. I do enjoy beer,” he said). When Voodoo Brewing Co. approached Sullivan about a beer-flavored ice cream, he was interested but wanted to be sure the quality was just right.

“I said, ‘You’re going to have to bring the beer up here, and I have to try it, because if I don’t like the beer, I won’t do it,'” Sullivan recalled. And the final product had to meet all of their standards, he added — if Voodoo Brewing Co. didn’t like the ice cream, it wouldn’t move forward.

Fortunately, the batch of ice cream turned out and both parties liked it. And the general public apparently agrees. The ice cream was made available publicly on March 16, and by the afternoon of March 17, it had run out.

To make a beer ice cream, the alcohol needs to be cooked out of the beer (“We don’t have a liquor license, so we’re not allowed to sell beer,” Sullivan said). And the alcohol isn’t the only problem — beer is mostly water, and too much water isn’t good for an ice cream recipe. So in cooking out the alcohol, the water also is cooked out, leaving a syrupy beer reduction. That is added to the other ice cream ingredients, everything is ran through a machine, then it’s put in a deep freezer (at -15 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight. The ice cream then has to be removed from the deep freezer for at least three hours to reach a “scoopable” temperature.

And that’s the brief overview on how beer ice cream is made.

“It might sound like a laborsome process, but it’s really not. The machines are doing all the work, and a it’s just a matter of time for it to freeze and be ready to serve,” Sullivan said.

The beer ice cream will be a rotational flavor. Casey’s Ice Cream and Candies offers 40 flavors in the shop at all times, and five or six of those flavors rotate. Other rotating flavors include an avocado ice cream, a sweet potato ice cream, and a habanero ice cream.

“Already (the beer ice cream) is one of my favorite rotating flavors,” Sullivan said. “I ate quite a bit of it.”

Casey’s Ice Cream and Candies is at 11343 Port Road in Meadville.