Cost of one pint of Sadboy Creamery ice cream, with tax: $18.95.
Wait, what now? You heard that right.
What in the name of Phish Food is going on here? Keep reading.
Is Denver’s Sadboy Creamery really that great? First of all, as my 11-year-old loves to say, that’s offensive. Second of all: Yes. It’s the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted.
Have you tasted a lot of ice cream? First, that’s offensive, and second, that’s a HIPAA violation. But yes.
What’s the best flavor of Sadboy? Their best flavor is the last one you tried. I did not know I needed an ice cream based on banana bread. I don’t even like tiramisu at a restaurant but after tasting their Teary-misu, I considered acquiring a second freezer in a gated, patrolled community across town. If I perchance someday cadge a pint of Big Cookies Dough-n’t Cry or Donut Cry for Me, I will never ask for anything again, ever.
What are some of the most tortured sadness-themed ice cream flavors Sadboy has produced? New Year’s Grieve. Anakin Crywalker. Merry Crisis. Berry De-Pretzed Again. Life in Maca-ruins. Chai Me a River.
LEFT: Daniel Larom scoops Teary-misu into pint containers. RIGHT: Freshly made ice cream, which will soon become Nana’s No-Bake Cookie ice cream, swirls its way from a small, slow-churning gelato machine imported from Italy. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Are these some of the worst puns in marketing? Yes. They don’t care. Chai them a river.
How do you acquire a pint of this Sadboy Creamery? Sign up for a text blast. Then be looking at your phone at 9:55 a.m. on Monday mornings. At 10 a.m., when the ice cream pictures go live, pick one immediately and hope the credit card approval happens fast.
What does “immediately” mean? Immediately means moving so fast you go back in time two seconds and beat out the 12,000 other people waiting online. If you do not feel capable of this, get your nephew who spends 18 hours a day on Call of Duty or your niece who wins Candy Crush on the car drive between soccer and ballet to press the buttons for you.
OK, but what “actually” happens most of the time? You are two seconds too late, and you are sad.
What can I do in that case? Try to make friends with a faster person from the Reddit thread. Good luck with that.
If I do manage to land a pint, they deliver it or something, right? Hahahahahahahahahahaha.
Some other way, then? You must show up at an appointed time later in the week, stand in a line snaking around the block at East 13th Avenue and Sherman Street, slowly edge your way up the stairs to a second-floor apartment — try hard not to trip the people coming downstairs with a pint who look like they just got handed OpenAI stock options — and give your name politely to co-owner Adam Yala standing behind the cooler and the computer screen with your name on it.
Customers lucky enough to have scored a pint of Sadboy ice cream during a Monday online drop must then get in line at East 13th Avenue and Sherman Street on a different day for pickup appointments. (Michael Booth, The Colorado Sun)How many pints do they sell during a drop? They have contests to see who can handpack the most pints in a shift, or as a team how many they can produce in a day. So the final weekly number is delimited by staff exhaustion and how many times the mixers break down. (They are also running the next Spartan obstacle course as a team. In the world of high-fat ice cream, that’s called playing for the tie.) On most Mondays, they have about 700 pints of a half-dozen flavors to put in the drop.
Can’t they just make more? Long answer: Consider how they get a coffee flavor. They steep top-shelf espresso beans in cold water for 48 hours. When the flavor of their first attempt wasn’t strong enough, founder Michael Kimball realized the beans needed to be stirred up after 24 hours and then allowed to sit for another 24 hours to get the right concentration. This is how they make one flavor element in a pint that might have six or eight distinct flavors. So, short answer: No, they can’t.
Number of Denver-area handmade ice cream shops the Sadboys truly respect: One.
Name of the one Denver-area handmade ice cream shop the Sadboys respect: Nuggs.
What the Sadboys say when trying to be polite about another brand of handmade ice cream they think sucks: “It’s encouraging.”
What does THAT mean? “It leaves us room to make great ice cream.”
LEFT: Michael Kimball, right, co-owner of Sadboy Creamery, and Daniel Larom, pack pints of Teary-misu on May 11. RIGHT: Adam Yala, co-owner, strains juice from a large container of strawberries that will be used for a sherbet base. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)
What is the biggest factor in the Sadboys’ ice cream snobbery? They disdain air. Your average $5 store-bought pint of mediocre ice cream may be made from good butterfat, but they stretch profits by mixing in free air. A store-bought pint might weigh 250 grams. A Sadboy pint starts at about 550 grams.
Is heavier better? That’s offensive. And yes. Instead of eating air, you are consuming the density of dairy perfection and artisanal banana bread mix-ins, approaching the nostalgia event horizon. Emma Derus holds the record for heaviest pint ever packed by Sadboy: 610 grams.
Are the Sadboys being fair to their competition? “Ice cream does in fact have up to 50% air entrained in the product,” said Scott Rankin, a professor in dairy and ice cream science at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Does the prospect of dense, nostalgia-infused ice cream tickle the fancy of Wisconsin’s Dr. Ice Cream? “I’m not a business person, but $16 a pint is definitely on the high end of the scale — very high,” Rankin said. “But with ventures such as this, you are applying your money to something more than just food and sustenance, right? It’s indulgent experience, supporting local business, encouraging entrepreneurship.”
This story first appeared in Colorado Sunday, a premium magazine newsletter for members. Experience the best in Colorado news at a slower pace, with thoughtful articles, unique adventures and a reading list that’s perfect for Sunday morning.
SUBSCRIBEWhere is Sadboy made? Picture a big kitchen the size of a tiny kitchen, on Federal Boulevard, crammed with ripening bananas, random cookbooks, totally stressed-out mixing machines, five or six employees with forearms of steel from packing pints, and the equivalent of the annual cream output of Switzerland.
Where does the sad part come in? Kimball and his pals appear to have a guiding philosophy: Ice cream is the answer, What was the question? They believe the actual sadness of a bad breakup or a mean review or parental criticism can best be addressed by extra-fatty, handcrafted ice cream that was conceived, blended and packed with love. And then drizzle in heaping tablespoons of nostalgia, which is really just sadness reduced by time into a caramel sauce.
What are the Sadboys nostalgic about? There’s a lot of “Nana this, Nana that” thrown around the kitchen. But they do mean it. On a recent Monday, Kimball was taking angry texts from shutout online shoppers while supervising the mixing and packing of a batch of Nana’s No-Bake. Kimball’s grandma let him help make his childhood favorite cookie, and the ice cream version includes a banana base, with mix-ins of oatmeal blended into rich melted chocolate, firmed up in the fridge and then cut by hand into small chunks for the scratch-made base.
Kimball and Yala were in the Boy Scouts. Their favorite memory was baking fruit pies over the campfire in those hinged pie irons. Thus was born Smoky Peach Cobbler, an IV drip of which would cure most diseases.
How do the Sadboys come up with flavors? Kimball and his husband, and now co-owner, Austin Walker, think about ice cream flavors pretty much 24/7. When they get stuck, and for team morale, they also hold periodic staff contests for a future drop.
Are there no bad ideas? No, there are in fact some very bad ideas. But they can be rescued. Hunter Verhulst came up with a holiday flavor based on his grandma’s love of peppermint bark candy, but the first batches had a macadamia-nut-to-cream-base-ratio that was waayyyy off. “I really had to, like, kind of dial it down a couple of times,” Verhulst said. “And, you know, the peppermint oil is super potent. It’s way different than the extract. So I had to dial that in as well. It was a process, for sure. It took me a little while, but I got it. And it’s one of my favorite flavors.”
There’s a pause in the kitchen rattle while his workmates roll their eyes at Verhulst’s goofy grin.
“Mainly because I made it.”
Small piles of cookbooks adorn a shelf holding silver cooking pots above the work stations for the small crew at Sadboy Creamery. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)Are the Sadboys bad at math? Possibly. Or the artists inside them just can’t be bothered. That Monday, they made 180 pints of Nana’s No-Bake. How many pints of Hazelnut Pistachio Biscoff Cookie did they make? Because it’s one of the trickier recipes they have, only 30.
Do people say mean things about Sadboy on social media? Hahahahahahahahahahahaha duh.
OMG what do they say? “Ain’t no way I’m waiting for any kind of ‘drop’ for ice cream. Not everything needs to be super hyped and exclusive. What are we even doing here?” “$15 a f- – – – – g pint? That’s criminal.” “The whole system seems glitchy and flawed … every time I log in and IMMEDIATELY add an ice cream to my cart and then it glitches out and nothing goes in my cart then they all sell out within seconds.”
Yikes, does anybody say nice things? Way more. “I had a bad day last week and had to stick around downtown after work to pick up, dealt with Cap Hill parking and traffic, saw that I had to wait in line to pick up, drove through rush hour traffic 40 minutes … and then I had a bite and my day was better, that Teary-misu was damn good.” “Best ice cream in town hands down.” “Absolutely worth the hassle. Tastes more like gelato than ice cream which I LOVE and the mix-in to ice cream ratio is insanely good.”
Is the whole weekly “drop” model a vast conspiracy to deprive Denver of its happiness? That really makes Kimball sad. Until they can make bigger batches, an online fastest-finger race is the only fair way to distribute the goodness, the Sadboys say. And until they open a retail counter, appointment-only pickup is the best model.
“I just try to remind them that we’re human, like, I’m a real human being trying to make a special product for the Denver community,” Kimball said, gesturing at Daniel Larom hand-packing the 80th of 150 pints of Teary-misu.
“I’ve seen some things going around that it’s ‘manufactured scarcity.’ Which is a crazy idea that we would intentionally sell less product than we could. But people have gotten that idea, and so they think that we’re doing this on purpose, instead of us just making a really good product that takes a lot of labor. So we appreciate people’s patience as we grow. We understand that it’s competitive and hard to get, so we’re addressing that by growing. But at a rate that’s going to allow us to keep the quality and not compromise that.”
Will the Sadboys get bigger and sell more? They will. Sometime this summer, they will move to a bigger kitchen and a retail counter on East Colfax Avenue’s LGBTQ-friendly “Lavender Hill” neighborhood. No scoops — still just pint pickups, until they are sold out. The online drop system will remain.
What flavor is currently in Kimball’s head? Rocky Road. Sadness and disappointment built into the name. He’s experimenting with different sugared almonds. It’s close. Be patient, for crying out loud.
What is the best part of the Ben & Jerry’s factory tour in Vermont? The actual outdoor graveyard of dead flavors. Obviously.
Does Sadboy have a graveyard of flavor failure? Yes. Metaphorically speaking.
What’s in it, metaphorically? Gummy Shark, for one. “It was a kind of a blue raspberry mango with a marshmallow swirl throughout. It was a little sweet,” Kimball said. “I might make it again. I’ve learned a lot since then.”
How many drops of natural banana coloring must Verhulst drip into the base for a hundred pints of Nana’s No-Bake? 64.
What happens when his mind wanders after drop 33? “We blame Dan. And then we have to throw it away.”
Is there another reason one flavor is called New Year’s Grieve? Glad you asked. The biggest portion of Sadboys’ charity work involves a New Year’s Eve fundraiser to support the Trevor Project, which focuses on suicide prevention among LGBTQ youth.
“Inherent to the Sadboy brand is a conversation about mental health,” Kimball said. “We keep it light-hearted. But just having that kind of conversation about it is really important to me. So we’re going to continue to do that on New Year’s Eve, because that’s when the most suicides are committed.”
What is Adam Yala’s favorite customer story? “This guy was getting the ice cream for his wife at pickup, and was kind of annoyed by the fact that the ice cream was pricey and that it was harder to get, and so on. And I gave him a pint of Smoky Peach Cobbler, and I explained the background to him. And he had a son who was a Boy Scout, so he was very familiar with what we were trying to do. And he came back the next week, and his attitude was completely different. He was like, I get it, you know? Like, I also had that experience …being transported to a different time.”
Is there any big-name ice cream brand Sadboys admit to eating? Smirks all around.
“We’ve kind of ruined ice cream for ourselves,” Kimball admits. “But that’s OK, other people tell us we’ve ruined ice cream for them as well.”
A pile of lids wait their turn to cover pints of ice cream at Sadboy Creamery. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)How long was the awkward pause before the Sadboys finally stopped smirking and named one edible brand? About 10 seconds longer than would have been polite.
So? Which brand? “I mean, I’m not mad about a pint of Häagen-Dazs, specifically their strawberry,” Kimball said. “My husband’s favorite is (Ben and Jerry’s) Cherry Garcia.”
Is there a bottom to the “sad” puns? There is not. Kimball is working on an update to a past watermelon-flavored drop. Quite good, actually, but some room for improvement. The name? Melon-choly Mint.
Has anyone famous bought their ice cream? Not that they know of.
What famous person would they want to buy their ice cream? Kristen Wiig. Kristen Wiig starred in a campy comedy critics quite liked called “Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar,” that was buried by COVID but has a loyal streaming following. The Sadboys watch it over and over again because it makes them not-sad. They have named kitchen machines after “Barb and Star” characters.
The three small gelato machines Kimball started with and still uses for new flavor testing are Barb, Star and Edgar. The two larger mixing machines are named Trish and Tommy.
“So if Kristen Wiig wants a pint …,” Kimball begins. “That would be SW-eet,” Verhulst finishes.
Gov. Jared Polis is famous. Sort of. What if he declared a Capitol ice cream emergency at 14th and Sherman and sent a state trooper down to jump the line at 13th and Sherman for a pint of Cereal-ously Sad?
“We would let him know,” Kimball said, “that he can go online on Mondays.”
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