A Day of Samples

Hello again everyone! It's been a busy couple of days for Glacier Ice Cream. I spent most of yesterday in Boulder going over our schedule and collecting materials and information from Mark Mallen, Glacier's founder. Then I ran down to Denver to look at some of our equipment. I'm really excited about the cool display cabinets we're getting. They're really top of the line european-style units. Beautiful!

I was so busy going to meetings today I forgot to eat breakfast and missed lunch. Luckily, I was visiting some of our future wholesale vendors, so I didn't starve entirely. Instead, I had to make it through the day on nothing but chai, coffee, and chocolates. There's this great chocolate maker in town that just opened up. No real retail location yet, just a production facility. My lovely wife Amber met me down there and we took a tour and tried some samples and got to know the people a bit. Then we watched the chocolatier temper the chocolate and start filling the molds for some delicious white chocolate and grand marnier ganache truffles. I'm really excited about the possibilties for this partnership and the chance to offer some top quality european-style chocolate confections to our customers. Keep an eye out for special truffle and coffee and truffle and gelato combos and promotions once we open. Here's a quick (slightly shaky) video of the tempering machines.




We're also doing a coffee tasting this weekend of the various samples we're considering carrying. It should be a lot of fun. I'm not a big coffee drinker, so that fact that some of this coffee tastes great even to me should get you all excited. An "I'd drink this" from me is like a rave review from anyone else. 99% of coffees I won't drink, period.

One of the best things we're doing, in my opinion, is how we're sourcing our products and ingredients. We're going to be bringing the best possible products and ingredients from Colorado and from around the world. Where possible, I'm working to get all fresh and local ingredients for our ice cream. This is the land of Palisade peaches, Rocky Ford melons, Penrose apples, Hotchkiss grapes, and Paonia cherries. I want those to be the flavors you taste when you buy a cone of our fresh seasonal ice creams. We're going to squeeze fresh limes and lemons for our citrus flavors and make fresh caramel and fudge in our own production kitchen. For the rest of our ingredients, we're scouring the world for the best, most flavorful, and exotic ingredients. Nestle chocolate and canned pie cherries are ok, but wait until you try the Valrhona chocolate sorbet or the Amarena cherry ice cream.

That's all for now. Just for fun, I've included a video of me risking my life driving around in our shopping center, for those of you who have yet to visit it. Enjoy!