McConnell's - Peppermint Stick

Peppermint Stick - Fresh, Central Coast, grass-fed milk & cream and a dash of R.R. Lochhead® vanilla, mated to bracing, organic peppermint and natural, peppermint candy.

After finishing off all of the current Ben & Jerry's flavors, I was going to wait until November to start venturing into other brands, but I couldn't stay away!  Being a big fan of mint, I have had my eye on this McConnell's flavor for a while.  I noticed that the Peterman-catalogue-esque description on the back of the pint touts that this is a holiday-like flavor that you can get year-round and I was thinking to myself that if I waited too long then it would be the holidays, so I had better eat it now while it is still out of season!   With that rationalization, I restart the reviews a week or two early.

Peppermint Stick is a rare mint ice cream that does not feature chocolate chip.  McConnell's Mint Chip has been previously reviewed here and implemented to the mint-chocolate combination to absolute perfection and being a big fan of mint that had me greatly looking forward to this pint.

Opening the pint, I see a light pink base with brighter pink splotches evident in it.  Eating into the pint, it is indeed very minty.  The description on the carton mentions that there is vanilla & peppermint in the base, but I just tasted mint.  I expected the larger splotches of peppermint candy to be hard or crunchy but it was soft and blended in with the base.  It is like the candy is somehow pre-melted, yet somehow freezer cold, yet somehow dispersed in the pint without being fully blended into the base. 
McConnell's has done this before with its mix-ins, the brittle of Chocolate Almond Brittle had a melt-in-your-mouth quality to it as well as the chip in Mint Chip.  So, this was basically a candy-cane flavored ice cream but without the hard candy texture.

I was quite impressed with this flavor.  One minor quibble I had was that the ice cream did not seem to melt evenly has I got into the lower half of the pint.  There was the usual bit of runny-ness as there is in all pints but parts of each spoonful still felt icy and frozen.  McConnell's doesn't use a lot of air when they make their ice cream and depending on how much eggs get mixed in, their bases can have a dense gelato-like consistency.  That in and of itself is a good thing but the extra icy texture requiring extra in-mouth melting gives it a small deduction from this judge.   I do prefer Mint Chip to this flavor.  I think McConnell's uses extra eggs there (the mint base even has a yellowish tinge) which makes Mint Chip extra creamy.   Still, if you are a mint fan like me and are curious about a chipless mint ice cream, you'll want to try this Peppermint Stick flavor.