Phin & Phebes are a Brooklyn, NY based ice cream company founded in 2010 on the basis of churning out a small-batch product using all real non-GMO and fair trade sourced ingredients with no stabilizers or corn syrup. I’ve been seeing their name floating around for awhile but never gave them too much notice until a couple of flavors popped up at a local store that sounded too good to pass up. The first flavor I decided to dig into is Vanilla Malt Cookie Dough, which simply enough combines a vanilla malt cream with chocolate chip cookie dough.
Immediately the base hits me with a very intense sweetness, which normally I embrace in ice cream but for some reason is coming off as too sweet, almost cloying. The texture starts pretty creamy but finishes really thin and off-putting, like odd tasting cereal milk, and I gotta say I really don’t enjoy it. What I do enjoy, though, is the intense malty flavor, which has just the right amount of funkiness to distinguish it from a traditional vanilla or sweet cream. Unfortunately the malted flavor isn’t intriguing enough to offset the aggressive sweetness and lackluster texture that dominates the overall profile.
The cookie dough chunks are of average good size and have the gritty chew you would expect from this kind of mix in, but again, they taste incredibly sweet and don’t help push the flavor in any kind of enjoyable direction. While there is a nice brown sugar sheen coming from the dough I’m not getting any prominent butteriness or saltiness and the small chocolate chips are the only hint of complexity I’m getting out of this pint at all.
As an introduction to a new company I’ve been left extremely underwhelmed by Phin & Phebes and hope that this is an outlier miss flavor from a brand I was really looking forward to trying. There is nothing about this ice cream that makes me want to eat more of it and the onslaught of sugar without any kind of redemption becomes incredibly single-noted, and quite frankly, boring.