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| My table set up and my first group of taste testers! |
I recently became 1 of 20 people chosen nationwide to be a Turkey Hill Ambassador for the next 6 months. I'm super stoked because I love ice cream (who doesn't?) plus I love local companies and Turkey Hill is based out of Lancaster.
So when I received my first mission as an ambassador I wanted to make the most of it. This mission was to hold a taste test of some Turkey Hill All Natural Ice Cream flavors and see what people had to say.
Their All Natural line flavors include:
Chocolate
Vanilla Bean
Cherry Vanilla
Coffee
Mint Chocolate Chip
Salted Caramel
Vanilla Bean & Chocolate
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| Me and Merlot Mike from The Vineyard at Hershey handing out samples and explaining the pairings. |
The event was a taste testing AND competition with the Vineyard & Brewery at Hershey. We wanted to see which drink (wine vs. beer) went best with 3 different flavors of ice cream!
The pairings were:
Vanilla Bean Ice Cream with Twisted Kiss Wine
vs.
Vanilla Bean Ice Cream with Sap Sucker - Maple Porter Beer
Chocolate Ice Cream with Cocoa di Vezzetti Wine
vs.
Chocolate Ice Cream with MILF Chocolate Brown Ale Beer
Salted Caramel Ice Cream with the DeCider Wine
vs.
Salted Caramel Ice Cream with Mean Cup of Stout Beer
To promote the event I set up a Facebook event and spread the word on Twitter and Instagram!
After participants tried all 3 pairings I asked them to vote on a ballot sheet I had made up. During the sampling I paid attention to everyone's input about each flavor. So many people were pleased to learn that the samples were from Turkey Hill's All Natural Line because they were health conscious and very strict with the types of food they put in their bodies.
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| Counting the ballot sheets was quite a task! |
Such a fun and busy day. There were at least 115 participants over a 5 hour period!
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| Ice Cream in the cooler! |
People are so used to eating ice cream by itself but after the DeCider and Salted Caramel ice cream and the Vanilla and Maple Porter pairings, people were saying what a great idea it would be to make a float out of the two! This would be a fun idea for a get together with friends, especially when it's warm out!
It was amazing to see how many people thought that the taste of the ice cream WITH the drinks made it so much different than just wine alone, beer alone, or ice cream alone. In fact, most participants agreed that the combinations made them enjoy the ice cream even more because it spiced things up!
When it came to the most raved about pairing, the Salted Caramel Ice Cream with The DeCider was in the lead. The DeCider is a peanut butter caramel apple cider. It's delicious on it's own and they use REAL PEANUT BUTTER to make it!
Everyone was in such a great mood for the taste test and they were even more excited when they received $1.00 off coupons for the Turkey Hill All Natural Line! The event even reminded some of them that they still need to check out the Turkey Hill Experience!
When it was all said and done the flavor of ice cream that taste testers loved the most was Salted Caramel.
They also enjoyed the pairing of Salted Caramel Ice Cream with The DeCider. In fact it was the overall winner of all the pairings! A large amount of participants even said that they would love to have The DeCider be an ice cream flavor. I couldn't believe how delicious the pairing was when I tried it myself!
As for the Vanilla Bean Ice Cream, it went best with the Sap Sucker Maple Porter. It had a nice breakfast taste!
The Chocolate Ice Cream went best with the Cocoa di Vezzetti Wine. Someone said they wanted to make a shake out of it!
So it's 2 to 1. The Vineyard won against the Brewery with pairings!
And if you didn't get a chance to make it to this fun event, don't worry because I'll be holding at least 2 other Turkey Hill Ice Cream events over the next few months!
Thanks to all who came out!
