Craig Behun keeps a color-coded spreadsheet of every ice cream shop he’s visited.

It describes each shop’s location, ice cream quality and other details, like live animals or unsavory activity in the parking lot. 

After years making the rounds, Behun and his family have selected some of their favorites to share. This summer, they transformed a food truck into a traveling creamery-on-wheels featuring a menu of ice cream flavors from all over the state.

It was no small task. In all, the Behuns visited 323 Connecticut ice cream shops.

It all started 10 years ago, when Michelle and Craig Behun’s older son, Callan, was born. “We used to go to wineries and breweries and stuff, but then we said, it’s irresponsible,” Craig said.

Searching for something to do, they set out to try Connecticut Magazine’s list of the state’s top ten ice cream spots. “Our son loved to sleep in the car, so we took advantage of road trips, and we would just put him in the car and drive,” Michelle said.

Their first stop was Rich Farm in Oxford, a family-owned business that makes ice cream on site. Now the Behuns make an annual anniversary trip there — plus dozens of other trips out for ice cream each year.

They’ve been documenting their adventures on an Instagram account called CT Ice Cream Tour since 2015. The account page is packed with delectable images of hundreds of ice cream stops in Connecticut and beyond.

From the beginning, they had their work cut out. Connecticut is home to 18,000 milking cows across 84 dairy farms, according to Bryan Hurlburt, commissioner of the Department of Agriculture.

Many daily farms deliver milk directly to consumers, or sell through a farm co-operative to a milk processor, which is how it ends up in a grocery store. The milk is also used to make yogurt, cheese, and in one case milk chocolates, Hurlburt said.

But in recent decades, small and mid-sized farms, facing rising costs for equipment and labor, have been under pressure to consolidate. The Department of Agriculture is working with some of those farms to transition from selling milk to the commodity market to developing more specialty products — like ice cream — which could be more profitable.

“What we have in Connecticut, that not every other state has, is a really interested consumer marketplace,” said Hurlburt. It’s about “different ways to take the milk and add value to it that a customer would appreciate and generate additional revenue for the farm,” said Hurlburt.

By Craig Behun’s count, Connecticut is home to about 70 homemade ice cream purveyors, which he reckons makes it the best state for ice cream stores per capita.

One of these makers, the University of Connecticut’s Dairy Bar — where the Behuns source the vanilla ice cream served from their truck — uses milk made by the cows that graze on campus, supplemented with locally-produced cream.

Students have been taking part in ice cream production at UConn since the early 1900s, and the Dairy Bar store has been open to the public since 1953. It’s an opportunity for students to learn about ice cream production — and for locals and day-trippers to enjoy it.

The Dairy Bar serves around 250,000-300,000 customers a year. Manager Ethan Haggerty said most of those customers aren’t UConn students.

Haggerty said the secret ingredient in UConn’s ice cream is the machinery. Compared to modern production techniques that pasteurize in minutes, UConn’s 1950s-style machines pasteurize the product overnight. That “gives us a really high butter fat content, which is generally your ice cream quality,” Haggerty said.

“It’s impossible to replicate the product,” he said.

While some may call it an obsession, the Behuns describe the deliberate approach they’ve taken to assembling their ice cream menu as thoroughness.

“In order to say, ‘Here are the best,’ you have to have tried them all,” Craig said.

It’s not the only thing the Behuns are obsessed with.

The family has also ranked every mini-golf course in the state. And last winter they went to a game for every Division I men’s basketball team in Connecticut. This year, they have plans to visit a game for every team in Division II.

One of the Behuns’ family members has visited all of New Hampshire’s covered bridges. Michelle said Craig wasn’t interested in that. “My kids are spoiled,” she said.

After 10 years of ice cream adventures with Callan and his younger brother Ashton, 7, in tow, the Behuns were ready to get in gear and start their own business. They bought a truck from now-shuttered Tipsy Cones, and the family wrapped up refurbishing it in June.

Now the truck is making appearances at events across Connecticut and stocks flavors like peach melba, Graham jam, and Guinness chip.

It’s a logistical challenge to transport so many flavors from different places while making sure they don’t melt. The Behuns drive all over the state for their pickups, storing the ice cream in a freezer bag in the car, then in chest freezers in their basement.

Michelle said she’s spent countless hours scouring Facebook’s Marketplace looking for chest freezers. The family now owns seven.

Callan, whose favorite flavors are Twinkie, Cookie Monster and chocolate chip, said he enjoys scooping the tail ends of the large cartons into pint containers for the family’s kitchen freezer.

The hardest part of reaching your hand into a 3-gallon tub? “You get sticky,” Callan said.

Opening an ice cream truck “was something that we wanted to do maybe down the road, but the opportunity kind of fell in our laps” with the Tipsy Cones truck, Michelle said.

Craig and Michelle, who are both teachers, said some of their colleagues have provided support to the ice cream operation in exchange for free treats. An art teacher made the flavor signs for the truck, and the vice principal of the boys’ school invited them to vend at a back-to-school movie night earlier in August. 

For now, the Behuns said the priority is attending their kids’ baseball games. But they’ve set up shop at several events this summer and plan to continue through the fall.

And, of course, baseball games often end with a scoop.

“We are pretty happy people,” Michelle said.

“Everybody’s pretty happy when we’re giving them ice cream,” added Craig.