Will beer soft serve be this year’s Minnesota State Fair food craze?

Charlie Burrows is obsessed with finding “the next corn dog,” a runaway food hit that becomes an essential stop on any Minnesota State Fairgoer’s list of must-eats.

He’s come pretty close. The popularity of the Tot Dog a few years ago — a Tater Tot-wrapped hot dog on a stick — took him by surprise, and had his LuLu’s Public House stand in the fair’s West End struggling to keep up.

And last year’s Deep-Fried Ranch, which will return in 2025, became a sensation, garnering national press and massive lines for this wonton-like spin on Minnesota’s favorite condiment.

This time? He’s going all in on beer soft serve.

The frozen treat, served in a cone, is made out of Pryes Brewing’s Royal Raspberry sour ale and a proprietary mix of stabilizer and sweetener that, when combined in a soft serve machine, pumps out a perfectly creamy and cold non-dairy treat.

It’s beer, but lick-able. And Soft Serve Royal Raspberry Beer has the potential to be the breakout star of the State Fair’s 70 new drink offerings.

“We’re competing for a very, very small piece of real estate,” said Burrows, who co-owns Lulu’s, along with a handful of Twin Cities metro restaurants, with Mike Brennan.

And beer soft serve is all innovation.

A beer seller he worked with brought him the idea of a beer-based ice cream. Burrows poked around on the internet and found a company making the blend of ingredients that could turn the beverage into a solid. He bought a pack of it, and then turned to Jarrod Deehr.

Deehr is the vice president of Redco, a food service equipment supplier in South St. Paul. The conversation didn’t last long.

“I go, ‘Let’s try it,’” Deehr said. He suggested using a soft serve machine from a Wisconsin manufacturer, Stoelting.

“We thought we’d be here for six hours” testing it out, Deehr said, but they nailed it right away. “This can’t be that easy,” he said with a laugh.

The team experimented over several months with a variety of flavors, including a pineapple-orange-guava beer and a blueberry beer. They landed on the raspberry sour, which is 4.8% ABV. In soft serve form, the beer’s sourness and natural bitterness are muted, while the sweet raspberry flavor is amplified. It’s as refreshing as sorbet, but not as sweet. And it still, surprisingly, tastes like beer.

“Freezing it really smooths it out and just makes it mellow,” said Alex Jacoby, Pryes Brewing’s sales director, who works with State Fair vendors.

Pryes had tried making beer soft serve years ago, renting the machines for a special event, but the Minneapolis taproom couldn’t keep up with the demand for the cool treat. So when he heard that Burrows was interested in creating beer soft serve for the fairgrounds, he knew he had to make it happen for Pryes.

“We were just like, oh my gosh, we would love to be partnered with you on this new innovation that I think is going to light the fair up this year,” Jacoby said.

They shouldn’t have a problem meeting the demand this time. This beer is one of Pryes’ bestsellers, and they have already delivered double the kegs of a typical State Fair order. They’re also on standby to go up to 10 times the amount of beer they normally go through at the fair.

If it’s as popular as Burrows suspects, the possibilities are endless.

Maybe next year, he’ll offer a twist, with a chocolate stout on one side and an orange beer on the other. And he and his partners might keep brainstorming on the name.

“Sor-beer,” Brennan suggested.

It might sound unusual, but, as Burrows likes to say, “Remember, even the corn dog was, at one time, a revolutionary product.”