Ice, Baby

Ice, Baby - written, edited and curated by Clifton Bertram

Shaken or stirred? The oft-posed question, surprisingly, is just the beginning. If you really want to mix the perfect cocktail - to prove you are cosmopolitan by demonstrating your skill at mixing up a Cosmopolitan, you need to pay close attention to one of the forgotten ingredients of the mixologist's art: ice. To understand the benefits and uses of ice in cocktails, we first turn to Oh Gosh!, a terrific blog by twentysomething Londoner Jay Hepburn.

Tips for Beginners: Ice by Jay Hepburn

Perhaps the most overlooked of all cocktail ingredients, ice plays several important roles in a cocktail. The first and most obvious is as an agent to cool the drink down whilst mixing. Coldness inhibits taste receptors in the tongue, which makes the drink more palatable and taste less, well, alcoholic. Try drinking neat vodka and ice-cold vodka and you’ll see what I mean. The ice also adds an amount of water to the drink, which further helps take the bite out of the alcohol, as well as bringing out the flavours.

The first cocktails I made were Cosmopolitans, which I concocted using a three-part cobbler shaker and about four small cubes of ice. At the time I only had one ice tray in the freezer, so I didn’t want to waste too many cubes on each drink. When I had finished shaking these cocktails, only very small bits of ice were left at the bottom of the tin. I didn’t see a problem with this… the ice had done it’s job right?

Wrong.

To read more of this content at Oh Gosh!, click here.



So, clearly, the composition, shape and size of your cubes is as important as any other ingredient in mixing the perfect refreshment. But reaching that alcoholic ideal is more difficult than might first appear, as Wired Magazine's Christopher Null recently found out.

Baby, it's Cold Inside: One Man's Search for the Perfect Ice Cuby by Christopher Null

Some say the world will end in fire. Some say it will end in ice. I hope it’s the latter. Finding a good ice cube to chill your cocktail is hell enough as it is.

Being serious about drinking means being serious about ice. And at a good bar, this is rarely a problem, as top bartenders have an easy shortcut: Kold-Draft icemakers. Kold-Draft’s perfect 1¼-inch cubes are legendary in the mixology scene, but the equipment isn’t remotely approachable for the home user: The company’s smallest unit ($2,500 street) produces 321 pounds of ice a day and weighs 174 pounds — and that’s without a bin to collect all the ice.

And so the real ice nuts have turned to hacking. My friend and fellow drinks-writer Camper English is so obsessed with ice that he freezes it at home in cooler-sized blocks in an attempt to create cubes of the perfect clarity for the sophisticate. It took him dozens of experiments, but he finally hit on the right formula, and Wired published it.

I don’t have the patience, time or physical space to generate ice by the cubic foot, so Wired.com asked me to find out how to get the very best cubes at home without resorting to getting rid of my frozen corn and IKEA meatballs.

To read more of this content at Wired Magazine, click here.

As Christopher Null points out, there are companies that are wisely focusing on providing a solution to the egregious ice gap in the provision of fine cocktail ingredients. Michel Dozois is just one of these.

The Iceman Cometh: The Rise of a Gourmet Ice Entrepreneur

Michel Dozois is pinning the success of his two-year old company on the dubious thrills of watching ice melt.

When courting new clients, Dozois, the owner of Los Angeles's Névé Luxury Ice Company, sits them down for a simple experiment. He fills two Old Fashioned glasses with ice—the first with conventional cubes, the second with his company's "ice rock," a single large cube, which takes up about 50 percent of the glass—and tops them with a dram of good whisky (his spirit of choice is Laphroig). Dozois then asks the potential clients to sit back and wait, allowing nature to take its course.

About every seven minutes, he asks the client to take a sip—first of the conventional drink where the ice is rapidly melting, then of the drink made with the sturdy opaque brick of Névé ice. The second shows minimal dilution; it's essentially whisky served neat, but much, much colder.

To read more of this content at The Atlantic, click here.

If you are having difficulty finding the perfect ice to put in your drink, you can at least surround yourself with cool at an Ice Bar, one of the latest trends in cocktail consumption. Ice bars are popping up all in major cities all over the world, from traditionally ice-friendly locations like Quebec City, Toronto and Chicago and even in more tropical climes such as Florida. One of these latter is the Minus 5 Ice Bar in Las Vegas.

Minus 5 Ice Bar - A Cool Las Vegas Experience

On our quest to find the Top 5 Las Vegas Cocktail Bars, we went to a number of different bars and clubs in Las Vegas in search of the perfect cocktail. In doing so, we found a bar that we felt was better visited for the experience of the bar than the cocktails it serves.

Minus 5º Ice Bar is located in both the Monte Carlo and in the Mandalay Bay (the Monte Carlo is slightly bigger, newer and less crowded). The cover charge for the bar (which starts at $25) includes entry into the bar, a parka, boots, and gloves to keep you warm, and your first cocktail. During off hours there are typically people standing outside the entry passing out cards for an additional free shot, which is worth snagging if you plan to go inside.

To read more of this content at Drink Spirits, click here.

Still, chilling yourself is much less efficient than chilling your beverage, and the always-efficient Japanese may have come up with the perfect way to do just that.

Want to Keep Your Drink From Getting Watered Down? It Takes Balls by Clifton Bertram

People are sometimes surprised to find that the Japanese like their whisky. But ever since In 1923 when Shinjiro Torii, the founder of Suntory and the father of Japanese whisky, built the country's first malt whisky distillery, the Japanese have increasingly appreciated the glories of the amber liquid. But, they don't like watered down whisky any more than you do, which is why they put their artisan's sensibilities to crafting the solution: the Ice Ball.



Of course, this could seem a bit too much like a bloodbath waiting to happen, especially if, like me, you are an amateur bartending who enjoys sampling one cocktail for every two that you make. Fortunately, there's a less-lethal solution, and one that carries the intact Japanese pedigree. As a public service, then, Midcentury Modernist introduces the Ice Ball Mold.



Just in case you can't afford high-priced imported bar gadgetry, we scoured the internet to come up alternatives, and found this at Answer.com: How Do You Make a Japanese Ice Ball. This useful article gives two or three methods, each easier than the previous.

Lastly, and because there's no end to our benificence at Midcentury Modernist, we leave you with the most affordable ice-shaping technology available, all centred around the venerable ice cube tray. There's a dizzying galaxy of choices available, from cubes ironically shaped like the Titanic, to cubes shaped like fish that you can fill with fruit juice that allow you to create your own aquarium in a highball glass. Check out the options at Hub Pages, Annie Spandex, or Odee.com. For truly nationalistic Canucks, there's even a tray that freezes ice in the shape of curling stones.

Cheers!