For too many years, ice has been treated like an under-appreciated background singer for the “star power” of the liquids at hand. As it happily chills bevvies of every sort, ice makes the main attraction look good, but gets little attention or praise, even from the thirstiest among us.
But that attitude has been changing as a number of innovative mixologists have risen to fame not just on the strength of their skills with liquids, but their ability to create perfectly shaped, utterly clear ice cubes that elevate and enhance all kinds of cocktails. And they do it by starting out with the humblest of ingredients — just plain old water.
Meet the man who wrote a whole book about ice.
In the world of those who care deeply about frozen chunks of H2O, Camper English reigns supreme. A cocktails and spirits writer and speaker who’s covered the craft cocktail renaissance for more than 15 years, he’s just written an entire book on the subject. In “The Ice Book: Cool Cubes, Clear Spheres, and Other Chill Cocktail Crafts,” the renowned cocktail “icepert” explains how good ice can make a big difference in whatever you’re drinking. The trick, he said, is understanding the role ice can play.
“Ice is a tool for chilling and diluting cocktails, and it can also be an aesthetic improvement, like beautiful glassware or a garnish,” he said. “I always say the difference between using cloudy and clear ice is like drinking champagne out of a styrofoam cup or crystal flute. Technically, the beverage is the same, but the drinking experience is elevated.”
How ice changes a cocktail, aside from making it colder.
That “elevation” of the experience is often what’s missing from a home-prepared cocktail. If you think that a properly chilled drink won’t taste much different from a room temperature one, you may want to reconsider. “Ice can make a difference on many different levels,” said Steven Huddleston, a self-described “molecular mixologist” and managing director of beverage and training at SquareOne Holdings, a restaurant management company.
“When you add ice, it allows for more expansive flavours, and it will help ‘open up’ the spirit for the best possible taste,” he said. “You can test this by adding just a couple drops of water to any spirit. That dilution allows aromatics to come through, while also taming that harsh burn on the back of the palate that can happen when sipping an undiluted spirit.”
Huddleston said that when you’re opening up alcohol in this way, it’s always smart to use the best ice possible. He referred to the master mentioned earlier, English, and said he heeded the expert’s warnings about how “shitty hotel ice” will contribute to a poorer-quality drink.
So if you’re making drinks at home and thinking about cutting a few corners, remember this advice from Sonja Overhiser, who, with her husband Alex, runs the cocktail and home cooking website A Couple Cooks. “Cocktails are all about presentation,” she said. “Sometimes home mixologists skimp on presentation, like using the wrong glass for the drink, omitting the garnish or settling for cloudy standard ice cubes.” Even small touches like clear ice, she said, can make a difference.
Clear ice has better taste and a slower melt.
“Clear ice takes a cocktail from mediocre to fancy bar status,” Overhiser said. “That’s due to both the look of the beautiful, crystal clear organic shape and the way it cools the drink.”
That clarity is important for a couple reasons. Cloudiness happens when impurities are in the water before it’s frozen. So if the ice cubes in your drink are totally clear, you know there’s nothing in that frozen block but pure, clean water. And while cloudy, impure ice might taste musty or freezer-burned, the clear cube will not impart any “off” flavours.
Another reason to love clear cubes? Because they contain only water and no impurities, they’ll be denser. That means they melt more slowly, chilling the cocktail without diluting it too much. A slow melt time, it turns out, is the ultimate prize in the quest of ice cube perfection.
“Unpurified water will freeze with small bubbles inside the cubes, and those bubbles are the impurities,” Huddleston explained. “That will break down the integrity of the ice cube, so when the liquid in the drink hits those bubbles, it begins to melt faster. The fewer impurities, the slower the melt.”
Start with good-tasting water, but don’t boil it.
“Bad-tasting water makes bad-tasting ice,” English pointed out. “If you filter the water you use to drink, you should use that filtered liquid for ice cubes.” But if you’re considering the need to boil ice cube water first, don’t bother, he said. “The boiled water urban legend is something everybody ‘knows’ and yet very few people have fact-checked.”
English believes the boil-to-freeze myth began in the early days of the post-2001 craft cocktail renaissance. “Some bars began making larger ice cubes than the ones made in ice machines to put into slow-sipping drinks, like the Old Fashioned. They froze water in large containers and then cut up the blocks into big cubes by hand. The ice was not clear, but bartenders tried to improve it by boiling the water first. Other bars melted down small clear cubes from an ice machine with hot water and refroze them.”
English said, “I heard about this quest for clearer ice and decided to do some home experiments. I boiled water and then froze it. The idea is that if you boil the water, all the air inside the water will bubble off. It doesn’t work, and the resulting ice is still cloudy.”
Prevent “smell transfer” in your freezer.
Water may not need to be boiled, but you still need to consider what it’s going to be sitting next to in your freezer. “Ice can absorb smells from the freezer and often the refrigerator, too,” English warned, noting that “it’s best to store aromatic food — like take-out food — in sealed containers so it doesn’t impact the ice. Alternately, store ice in sealable freezer bags, not in trays, so it won’t absorb smells.”
Play around with shapes.
It’s possible to find ice cube moulds in just about any shape and size, so try some new permutations and see if they make a difference in your drink. Cubes these days can range from long cylinders, perfect for a Collins glass, to a 2-inch square (or larger!) that’s ideal for drinks like a Manhattan. Or try a shape that’s completely round, since the sphere shape exposes less surface area for the same amount of volume as a cube. Those icy globes are said to melt more slowly and delay dilution longer than cubes.
Not all of us think bigger is better, of course. The current craze for pebble ice, also called nugget, pellet or Sonic ice, has been fuelled by many who love their drinks to start out — and remain — as cold as possible for as long as possible. The smaller-sized cubes, beloved by those who love to chew on ice, have become so popular that Starbucks is switching to pebble ice machines. There are even countertop appliances that make this type of ice for home use.
Try directional freezing for ultimate clarity.
English’s ice-making experiments led him to notice that, no matter which container or shape he used, ice near the outside of each container was clearer than ice near the middle. This led him to develop a home-freezer method that mimics the process used in professional grade Clinebell machines, the ones that tout ice blocks that melt at a 33% slower rate than less dense, unpurified ice.
His directional freezing technique makes clear ice by controlling the direction in which water freezes. “It’s a simple trick to force water to freeze into ice from one direction to another rather than from the outside in, as in a typical ice cube tray,” English explained. “It mimics how a pond or lake freezes naturally, where the ice tends to form in perfect clarity as it pushes trapped air and impurities away from the point of freezing.”
To try directional freezing, you’ll need a hard-sided cooler designed to hold a big lunch or a six-pack of soda. Fill the cooler with water and place it in a freezer with the top off so that the water is exposed to air on the surface. Because the cooler has insulation built into its sides and bottom, the water freezes from the top down rather than from the outside in. You can create one big block of ice, then cut away the impurities and chip your cubes into any shape you’d like. Here’s a step-by-step guide to directional freezing, with photos, from A Couple Cooks.
After first sharing this technique in a 2009 blog post, English has seen his method be adopted by many professionals. “But it wasn’t until YouTubers and Instagrammers began posting how-to videos of the process that it really took off,” he said.
Whether you try a new shape or style of ice cube, or begin to experiment with directional freezing, you might find that, like many cocktail trends fuelled by social media, the “quality ice” movement may be one with cold, hard staying power for a long, hot summer.