ice cream update
Batch 13: Guinness (version 1) - Not so good. I followed this recipe, which doesn't use nearly enough Guinness, and ended up mostly just tasting like sweetened condensed milk. A last-ditch effort was made by adding more Guinness while it was in the machine, but it only made things weird. Now you get a bite of the "custard" mixture followed by a bite of mostly frozen Guinness.
Batch 14: Almond - This was a fairly standard recipe, no serious difficulties. A bit too much extract was put in, which makes it strong-tasting (it uses both extract and almond paste).
Batch 15: Guinness (version 2) - This time I tried this recipe, which made a better ice cream, but it still didn't have enough Guinness flavor. Additionally, using vanilla bean paste made it awfully vanilla-flavored too. This would be awesome for floats, but not so good for just plain ice cream. Not awful, but not what we wanted either.
Batch 16: Dairy-free Peanut Butter - Used soft tofu, soy creamer and honey for sweetening (so it's not strictly vegan). Bit grainy, but interesting.
Batch 17: Philadelphia-style Cinnamon - these last two are "hey, we have stuff going bad in a few days and we're going out of town soon. Let's get it used up!" This used up the last of the cream going bad soon. It gets frozen tonight.
We're going to get the stout right - I may try using a different stout, such as Left Hand Milk Stout or one of the Weyerbacher stouts I have (though they have a fairly high alcohol content, which may complicate things. Heck, I'm almost willing to try using a stout malt extract(like homebrewers would use), though I'm sure that will be REALLY weird.