Spirited Licks started because every boozy ice cream recipe we found online had the same problem: they treated alcohol as a flavoring rather than a formulation challenge. Alcohol lowers the freezing point. It changes how sugars interact with fat. It affects texture, overrun, and melt rate. Ignore that, and you get soup.

Jon was a bartender in college and has been making drinks ever since, not as a hobby, but as a discipline. Over decades of football tailgates, travel, and entertaining, he developed the instincts of a working mixologist: the ability to read a flavor profile, balance competing elements, and know when something is finished. When he retired from a business career, he didn’t stop building things. He started building recipes.

Sharyl spent her career at General Mills as a Registered Dietitian and food scientist, working at the intersection of nutrition, ingredient function, and large-scale food formulation. She understands what happens at the molecular level when you combine fat, sugar, water, and heat — and what goes wrong when the ratios are off. She also knows how to fix it.

Together, they are an unlikely but precise partnership. Jon brings the cocktail instinct — the knowledge of how spirits behave, how flavor profiles layer, and what a finished drink should feel like. Sharyl brings the food science — the understanding of freezing-point depression, emulsification, overrun, and why alcohol and custard interact as they do. Neither credential alone would have produced this book. Both were required.

Spirited Licks began the way most good projects do, with a problem that turned out to be more interesting than expected. In every boozy ice cream recipe they could find, alcohol was treated as a flavoring — something you add at the end and hope for the best. Jon and Sharyl knew that was wrong. Alcohol lowers the freezing point of any base it touches. It changes the crystal structure, the melt rate, and the texture. Ignore that, and you get soup. Understand it, and you get something worth making for the company.

They test every recipe across three machines — a traditional compressor churn, a Cuisinart frozen bowl, and a Ninja Creami — because the machines are not interchangeable. Each one handles alcohol differently, freezes at a different rate, and produces a different texture. Writing one recipe for all three required understanding each one well enough to scale the alcohol content, adjust the base ratios, and produce a result that was genuinely good, not just technically correct.

Fifty-two recipes later, the answer to the original problem is in your hands.

Jon and Sharyl live in the Minneapolis area, where they entertain frequently and keep at least three flavors of boozy ice cream in the freezer at all times.