A popular barbecue joint can draw people wanting to enjoy some ribs or pulled pork from far and wide. “What other kind of food in the dessert category will people be passionate enough about to become a destination within Purcellville?” That was the question that led Brian Jenkins, the owner of Monk’s BBQ, to open an ice cream shop with a separate entrance above his restaurant. “We move a lot of barbecue through there and we don’t have a lot of dessert options,” he says.
When the space—which is nearly 100 years old and whose interior features exposed beams, a live edge cherry countertop and cow spots painted on the walls—above Monk’s became available, Jenkins decided to learn everything there is to know about ice cream, traveling as far as Florida to attend Mystic Ice Cream’s boot camp and then purchasing an Emery Thompson machine. “That’s a brand that’s been around for over a hundred years,” he says. “It’s the last American-made machine and they’re just tanks. They last for 45 years.”
Serving homemade old-fashioned ice cream free from stabilizers like guar or xanthan gum and whose milk comes from Baltimore’s Cloverland Dairy, Tipped Cow Creamery opened to the public on May 8. “I would call it a rustic country ice cream shop,” Jenkins said. “I think, in our ice cream, you can taste the freshness. It’s a little softer than some of the stuff you would buy at the grocery store.”
Their core lineup of flavors includes traditional offerings like vanilla, coffee, mint chocolate chip, cookies and cream, and strawberry, but also blackberry chocolate chunk and butter brickle. “The core is just what people would expect to see when they come into an ice cream shop,” Jenkins says.
“Our rotating flavors is what gives us our creativity,” he adds. These include green tea, luxardo cherry and carrot cake. “It’s the ice cream form of carrot cake,” he says of the latter. “We flavor the base, the dairy, with actual boxes of carrot cake mix and then we make a big old carrot cake and we just shove it in the machine toward the end.”
They also have a version of cereal milk ice cream. “We saw that being done in a couple other places,” Jenkins says. Theirs is infused with Lucky Charms and topped with the marshmallows. “As children, we all picked through and just ate the marshmallows.”
In addition to cups and cones, Tipped Cow also offers sundaes, shakes and floats made with Hank’s Gourmet Sodas. Plus, those looking for a custom dessert for a party can design their own ice cream flavor at the creamery. The minimum order size is 5 gallons.
Tipped Cow is open from noon-9 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday and scoops start at $3.50. // Tipped Cow Creamery: 251 North 21st St., Purcellville
