Homer Simpson would love this beer-flavored ice cream

If Homer Simpson were tapped to develop a new dessert, it might be something like this line of beer-flavored ice creams.

Salt & Straw is a Portland-based company known for creating off-the-wall ice cream — it’s dabbled with blue cheese, sea urchin, potato salad and smoked Oregon ham — but its Brewers Series sounds like something people actually might enjoy putting in their mouth. There are five flavors (porter, stout, lager, ale and hazy IPA) corresponding to five beers from famous microbreweries across the U.S., including Russian River Brewing right here in Santa Rosa.

The ice cream is meant not so much to taste like drinking a foamy, hoppy beer, but rather to deconstruct the flavor profiles of each delicious brew and then add an extra food-based pairing. For the Russian River selection, for example, the ice cream blends Supplication Ale — a year-aged beer that comes out once a year — with fudge, Manchego cheese and cherry marmalade. The end result, says the company, is a “fresh and tangy flavor.”

The other breweries Salt & Straw collaborated with are Monkish Brewing in Torrance, Breakside Brewery in Portland, Métier Brewing in Seattle and Cerveceria La Tropical in Miami. The flavors will be on offer through the month of June in shops around the Bay Area, from San Ramon to Palo Alto, as well as nationwide and via mail order. Here are the other beer ice creams, as described by Salt & Straw:

• Métier’s Black Stripe Porter & Bread Pudding: Métier Brewing is one of the country’s few Black-owned breweries, and has become the archetype of how breweries can build community for beer. (Salt & Straw co-founder Tyler Malek) created an ice-cream base with their Black Stripe Coconut Porter, combined with Seattle restaurateur Donna Moodie’s famous gooey bread pudding and crispy toffee.
• Breakside’s Barrel-Aged Chocolate Stout: Malek worked with award-winning Breakside Brewery’s head brewer Ben Edmunds to create a custom beer for this flavor. Cocoa nibs are steeped in barrel-aged stout, then coated in chocolate, combined with cream and sugar, and swirled with a rich tres leches cake, made with two leches and stout as the third liquid.
• Monkish’s Space Cookies & Cream Hazy IPA: The pioneer in Hazy IPA’s Monkish’s Space Cookies beer, which tastes like Nilla wafers, is replicated in ice cream form with a proprietary pastry technique, swirled with fresh grapefruit zest and Nilla wafer cookie butter.
• La Tropical’s La Original Lager w/ Guava: Refreshingly tropical ice cream is made from La Tropical’s 150 year old Cuban Ambar Lager recipe, with a homemade flan and a sweet guava drizzle, with underlying notes of honey.

Find Salt & Straw scoop shops at City Center Bishop Ranch in San Ramon, Westfield Valley Fair in San Jose, 1309 Burlingame Ave. in Burlingame, 250 University Ave. in Palo Alto, 50 University Ave. in Los Gatos and other locations; https://saltandstraw.com/.