Worth their salt?

New Belgium has teamed with Ben & Jerry’s to take beer and ice cream beyond the float stage.

The Colorado brewery’s new Salted Caramel Brownie brown ale, developed in collaboration with the Vermont ice cream company, has started rolling out around these parts in six-packs and draft.

There’s an accompanying Salted Caramel Brown-ie Ale ice cream which uses the beer in its base, augmented by brownie pieces and salted caramel swirls.

I was intrigued not just by the concept, but by the online debate over whether the beer actually lives up to its advertised flavor profile.

To my palate, the bottled version falls somewhere between the more pedestrian brown ale its critics proclaim, and the “big dessert beer blast” that New Belgium boasts.

At 6.3 percent alcohol by volume and 14 International Bitterness Units, it’s brewed with Caramel Munich and chocolate malts, with cocoa and vanilla powder added during conditioning.

It starts like an average brown, with the typical chocolate and nutty, toasty malt character. Then, as the saltiness starts to build, the vanilla heralds the arrival of subtle caramel notes (more pronounced as the beer warms) which surface well into an ultimately dry finish.

As for the ice cream, those mouthwatering mix-ins aside, your enjoyment will largely depend on your appreciation for the rather bitter beer-spiked base - which comes to the fore even more if you go full float and combine the two.

In any case, the collaboration supports a noble cause. A portion of proceeds from the sales of both products benefits Protect Our Winters, an organization founded by professional snowboarder Jerry Jones to fight global warming.

And as an extra treat, New Belgium has come up with an accompanying video game that’s just as addictive as the one Sierra Nevada devised for its Oktoberfest. (Even if I haven’t yet managed more than a paltry 44 points, which I blame on the combination of a balky mouse pad button and going old-school with the sled.)