True ice cream enthusiasts will enjoy it in any season, regardless of rain, cold, or shine.
Victoria, brimming with creative craft ice cream shops and ideal stops, has been thoroughly explored in a recent VictoriaBC subreddit post that conducted a comprehensive study of the city’s best ice cream spots.
Reddit user r/AlexRogansBeta, published a “dispatch from the Victorian Society for the Scientific Study of Food (VSSSF).”
“All summer, there was post after post about which place has the best ice cream,” the post reads. “I decided it was time to take action and put it to the test.”
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The five places tested, in alphabetical order, were 49 Below, Better Acres, Cold Comfort, Overboard, and Parachute.
Three categories of ice cream were tested: “Vanilla” aimed to find the best plain vanilla, though variations like Vanilla Bean were included; “Chocolate” sought the best chocolate ice cream, with similar variations; and “Wild Card” featured each creamery’s top recommendation, leading to a diverse range of flavours.
Some outliers in the test were addressed, such as 49 Below technically not having a straight-up chocolate flavour. Those issues are detailed in the “study.”
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For the “Wild Card” category, the selections were 49 Below’s Honeycomb, Better Acres’ Caramel, Cold Comfort’s Burnt Sugar & Salt, Overboard’s Lemon Pie, and Parachute’s Lemon Cream.
A total of 10 attendees tasted a pint of ice cream from each location and category using colour-coded spoons to rank each sample as “Good,” “Better,” and “Best,” with no ice cream deemed “bad.”
Overboard won best vanilla and chocolate, and 49 Below won best wild card flavours.
Here are the results:
r/AlexRogansBeta
The post acknowledges that with only 10 participants, the results are not representative of the general population, but the rigorous procedures suggest replicable results under the same conditions.
“Let this be an invitation to anyone who wants to recreate our experiment,” the post concludes.
To see the post in all of its robust glory, click here.