What We’re Drinking This Weekend: Boozy Berry Floats

A successful ice cream float isn’t as dependent on the ice cream as the name implies. You could be parsimonious with your cash or your calories and, really, no one would know the difference. Ice cream may be at the heart of a float, but soda is the soul.

When we’re straying from root beer and going fruity with our floats, we always turn to Hot Lips soda. The local pizza chain is serious about using sustainably grown, locally sourced ingredients for its pizzas, and its house-made sodas are no different. The fruit they use is the same fruit we line up for in the farmers market. Case in point: They use my most favorite berry farm, Ayers Creek, and most favorite variety of blackberry (Chester) to make their blackberry soda. It should come as no surprise that the soda tastes like blackberry pie.

This weekend we’re celebrating strawberry season and the (almost) end of the school year with a serious treat: berry floats. We stacked three scoops of vanilla ice cream in tall glasses, and pumped up the berry-liciousness with fat dollops of our Strawberry-Vanilla Freezer Jam layered in between. We topped it all off with a generous pour of Hot Lips Raspberry Soda (the strawberry version is currently sold out), and, for us grown-ups, a jigger of Cruzan white rum.

Refreshment that can double as dessert? We’ll drink to that.