When beer geek Stef Ferrari decided to open a creamery, she thought: Why not run it like a brewery? Now, her Hay Rosie Craft Ice Cream is making summer delish for Brooklynites with goodies like Sriracha Popcorn ice cream and Apricot-IPA sorbet. Her story’s nothing but sweet.

• I had been working as an ad copywriter and was bored with it; I was hanging out a lot at Gingerman in Connecticut, and eventually got a part-time job there. That’s where I got the craft beer bug.

• I decided I wanted to work for a brewery. I moved to Southern California, hooked up with The Bruery early on, and I eventually became a certified cicerone. Sometimes I labeled bottles, sometimes I served beer; you just jump in where you can.

• When I came back to New York, I was working as a cicerone exam proctor and was kicking around the idea of starting a business. I was looking into opening a brewpub, but ice cream has always been my obsession. I wondered if I could apply the brewery model to ice cream. I saw a lot of parallels: Just like beer, ice cream combines a lot of specialized knowledge, equipment and creativity.

• I never wanted it to be an ice cream shop; I wanted it to be a manufacturing facility and tasting room where people could see the process. Most ice cream companies buy an ice cream base that they flavor, but that’s almost like buying wort and hopping it. We wanted to make our own from scratch—milk, cream and sugar. We had to become a certified dairy processing plant to do it.

• I think about beer when I formulate something new. I think about what I love in a saison—the pear notes, the peppery yeast, the lemony hops. That’s how I developed our Saison-Poached Pear with Cracked Black Pepper flavor. Next, I want to work on an imperial stout; maybe I’ll use chocolate malts and maple syrup to get deeper, richer flavors.

• The idea for our Belgo IPI [India pale ice cream] was to capture the essence of a great IPA in an ice cream, and we found it couldn’t be done by simply using a beer as an ingredient. We steep a pale malt in our cream before adding Citra hops to the ‘boil,’ which is the cooking of our base mix. We replace a portion of the sugar in our standard base with a Belgian candy sugar, and finally we ‘dry-hop’ the base by adding whole-leaf Citra hops to the mix as it ages overnight. The result is a really unique experience that messes with your mind and acts as its own pairing. There’s a distinctive bitterness that is simultaneously complemented and contrasted by the cream itself, and the finish is all citrusy IPA.

• For our Sriracha Popcorn ice cream, we pop popcorn into the ice cream base, then we dehydrate a local Sriracha so it’s no longer liquid, then we flake it off into the finished product.

• We’ll do tasting flights of four flavors. People can see the ice-cream process through a window and ask questions. We’ll do pairing events at beer bars, brewery collaborations, and we’ll be open a couple days a week—just like breweries.