Ben and Jerry and Bill and Margo
It was about a half hour from
The tour itself was so so. It started with a 15 minute movie telling us the Ben & Jerry’s story. The movie was informative and gave decent background on the history of the company. The next part of the tour showed us the production end. This part was definitely disappointing.
From there is was into another room, where we were given a sample of ice cream. It was some chocolate flavor that I had never had before. I liked it, and would have considered buying a pint. But when Margo and I went over to the ice cream case (which was tiny!) there was frost on about ¼ of the pints. As some one has eaten a lot of ice cream, I have learned to never buy ice cream with frost on it. This is a sure sign that the product has been thawed and refrozen. This almost always means the ice cream will be full of ice crystals and tastes like iced shit. Bad move by the guys who should no better.
Oh, well. Life goes on. The sun was going down and we made a bee-line for the Flavor Graveyard. Ben and Jerry’s has about two dozen different flavors that they used to make, but don’t anymore. Usually they were discontinued because they didn’t sell. Flavors like “Oh Pear”, “Urban Jumble”, “Rain Forest Crunch”, and “Makin’ Whoppie Pie” now have a tombstone in the Flavor Graveyard. The headstone has an epitapth in the form of a poem and the years the flavor was on your grocer’s shelf. Looking around there was worth about five minutes. Semi-interesting by there were only a couple of dozen headstones.
Our last official duty here tonight was to take a picture in the ice cream lid Photo Op.
This had been a pretty full day and we were tired. But, our day was not done. We still had to get to our hotel. It was well after
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
I ended up leaving a bit disappointed. The factory tour starts out OK with a video telling about how Ben and Jerry’s came to be. Then there was the actual production tour, where we would get to see ice cream being made. The trouble was you couldn’t really see anything. Then came the good part. Free ice cream! Everyone got a small dish of a chocolate concoction. It was good. I had every intention of by a pint for later. But, when we got to the ice stand, I was very shocked. The ice cream freezer was small and about 25% of the packages of ice cream had frost on them. That means the ice cream has been thawed and refrozen. That is the one sure way to screw up ice cream. Ice crystals form and the ice cream structure breaks down. It looks bad and tastes the same way. I figured if there was one place in the world that would know how to treat a pint of ice cream, it was Ben and Jerry’s Factory. Someone didn’t get the word.
There were places to take gag pictures and to visit the Flavor Graveyard, which is a monument to flavors that Ben and Jerry’s no longer makes. They were nice, but it didn’t take away the bad taste (pun intended) of the frosty ice cream. It was a nice experience, but I doubt I would go back.
|
|
