Alcademics.com

Perfectly Clear Ice Balls - A Clever Trick

One of Alcademics' readers figured out a simple way to make perfectly clear ice balls by using a silicon ice ball mold, a piece of wire, and a pot of water. 

His name is Craig Belon and so he calls it the Belon Method. No actual parrots are required.

Artwork by Craig Belon, as are all photos in this post except the next one.

The method is this:

1. Get yourself a silicone ice ball tray like this one that comes in a pack of six. 

2. Over a pot of water (or better yet, a cooler as that will produce lots of clear ice) make a wire loop that the ice ball mold will sit on. 

3. Fill the pot with water just up to the wire. Also fill ice ball with water. Feel free to fill the ice ball with distilled or filtered water for better taste.

Dunk the filled ice ball mold into the pot of water  with the hole FACING DOWN. As you pull the mold up out of the water to set it on the wire. The water should stay inside the ice mold rather than running down into the pot. That's the whole trick.  

4. Freeze it.

As I figured out during all the ice experiments, the water freezes directionally from the coldest place to the warmest; and the first parts to freeze are perfectly clear whereas the last area to freeze is cloudy from trapped air, impurities, and pressure cracks.

In a typical ice cube, that's outside-in, with the cloudy part in the center.  In the Cooler Method I force that to be top-down. Using this pot the water will freeze from the outside-in, but the big pot creates a big heat sink so the top will be clear until after the ice ball is fully frozen.

So with the hole in the ice ball mold facing the bottom of the pot, as the water in the mold turns to ice and expands, it pushes out the extra air-filled water out the hole into the pot below. 

5. Let it freeze, then remove it. 

Now that's a sexy ice ball! Thanks for sharing Craig! 

For those of you who want to freeze more than one ball at a time, I'm guessing you could simply make multiple loops in the wire to hold multiple ice balls, but suspend it over a cooler (as in the Cooler Method) instead, as that is all freezing from the top-down. And at the end, you'd have a bunch of ice balls plus a slab of clear ice with which to make cubes. 

 

Belon also included a way he likes to drink absinthe using an ice ball. 

 

"Flawless Absinthe" by Craig Belon

Recipe:

1 Ice ball using the Belon Method
1 Absinthe glass (essential due to its shape)
1 Sugar cube
Chilled water

Directions: 

-place just enough absinthe into an absinthe glass to fill the bottom bulb part

-Insert Belon Method ice ball, corking off the absinthe in the bottom

-SLOWLY add water to the top over a sugar cube in the standard absinthe preparation fashion.

Physics: the water is denser than the liquor anyway, but with sugar dissolved especially more so. This water will flow around the miniscule gap between the ice ball and the edge of the glass, further cooling it. It will slip past the ball to the bottom of the glass, forming an absinthe-sugarwater interface in the bulb that slowly rises, producing the characteristic white precipitate.... but only at the interface! The fluids of differing densities will remain mostly unmixed over the course of 5-10 minutes, with a rising line of precipitate, until most of the absinthe is on the TOP of the glass, freezing, (it started at the bottom) and still crystal clear, and the sugar water at the bottom. This process produces a beautiful cascading effect (properly: Schlering lines)

What this means is that the drink actually starts as a pretty stout swig of pure absinthe that is frigid-cold, and as you drink it changes to become sweeter and sweeter. 

A cocktail that changes as you drink it, each sip different than the last. Thanks to physics. 

---

Well then, thanks to physics, and thanks again to Craig Belon for his brilliant little trick. 

 

Live from Buenos Aires: David Wondrich on Drink History in the Americas

Hello from Tales of the Cocktail on Tour in Buenos Aires! I am attending three seminars today held at the lovely Intercontinental Hotel. (Then the rest of the time I'll just be in bars.)

The first seminar was a talk by David Wondrich called Drinking the Americas from Punch to Prohibition

Below are notes I took in the seminar, mostly unedited, but let me know if these raise any questions and I'll try to answer them.

When Columbus arrived some South American and North American peoples had localized fermented beverages but not really any trade or exchange in them.

When the Spanish came, they tried to recreate Spain in the Americas. Havana, Cartagena, Santiago, Chile, etc. So they planted wine grapes which in some places succeeded. Then distillation. The Spanish weren't big spirits drinkers as much as Northern Europeans. So in the Americas it became important because distilled spirits travelled better than wine.

But the Spanish government in Spain tried to discourage practice of local distillation of grapes as it didn't profit them.

In the Caribbean, sugar cane grew very well. Wiped out existing land and economy, imported slavery. English islands were particularly brutal. English weren't interested in building new England - it was more like strip mining the local land to bring it back to England.

Making sugar produced a lot of industrial waste- molasses. But they realized it could be made into (bad) rum that is basically free; made from free raw materials. By the middle of the 1600s the rum industry was growing. Went up and down coast of the Americas; becomes the national drink of the North Americas and the Caribbean.

The English "weren't water drinkers" - drank beer and spirits. But beer didn't work in the Americas so well - hard to make and took up lots of space. When travelers come to America, they notice that everyone is drunk. Because wine doesn't work except for in a few places, not much beer outside of Massachusetts and Philadelphia, but for the most part it was spirits.

Before early 1600s people drank straight spirits, or fortified wines, or fortified beer drinks (pop-ins); infrequently spirits and honey or sugar and water.

Around 1610 English sailors got 1 gallon of (beer gallons = 5 liters) beer per day, which was 8-10 pints per day. But now boats are full of beer - takes up lots of storage. This worked in Northern Climates but not when going to hotter ones where beer would spoil.

First mention of cutting heads of spirits comes in 1700s., so spirits at this point were gross and needed mixing with other ingredients to make them palatable.

1610s, some crafty sailor decided to turn spirits back into wine, since beer was all spoiled. So someone restored acidity of wine with lemons or lime juice (citrus from coasts of Africa); then to cut the sourness/bite they added sugar. Sugar doesn't spoil so they can carry it on ships. Then they add water to reduce it more toward wine proof, then add spices. Now you have Punch.

Supposedly origins of the name comes from the Indian word ''paunch" for "five" (ingredients) but Wondrich doesn't believe it. Indians weren't drinking punch; they were drinking spirits but not punch. Probably comes from English word 'paunch' meaning round and short.

When punch got back to the Caribbean they found it made the rum taste good, which had been problematic before.

Punch spread around the world, particularly England and on the coasts. But in America you can't get very far inland easily. So didn't have access to limes etc.

Inland you had the whisky distillers. Still needed to mix it but didn't have lemons etc. But did have mint. So Juleps started happening. Inland uses whisky. On coast used rum. If you could afford it you used brandy or genever in Juleps.

The birth of the yankee school of drinking was the addition of ice. Frederick Tudor created the ice industry. The Mint Julep was the first iced drink, and it was world famous - people hated America but loved the Julep- thought it was marvelous that such ignorant hicks came up with something great.

Then they invented the cocktails.

Richard Stoughton invented and advertised Stoughton's Stomach Elixir in South London. Advertised it as good for you after a night of drinking, and recommended you to drink it with sweet wine in the morning - so that's bitters, sugar, and alcohol. In England, 'cocktail' was a generic term for something that cocks your tale up. (There was a practice of sticking ginger in a horse's butt before trying to sell it; this would make the horse cock its tail up and prance around, looking healthy.) Any drink in the morning could be called a cocktail, including ginger beer.

In the United States, however, the cocktail became standardized and attached to a spirits and bitters drink very quickly. (In that story from 1803 where cocktails in the US were first mentioned, a guy was also drinking a 'gin bim' which is gin barbados-style. So that's a gin swizzle. )

Cocktails became a thing in the upstate NY area, but the 1820s spread to everywhere in the US, made with most spirits (except rum), brandy, genever, whisky. Initially it was not an iced drink. Julep was an iced drink but not cocktail.

But by 1830s-1840s ice industry had been around a while as had the cocktail. So ice came to more drinks - sherry cobbler. Shake it in a cocktail shaker (just invented).

Then the cocktail became iced and because cocktail was a quickly-consumed drink you wouldn't want ice in it so you'd strain it out. By 1849 the gold miners popularized the way of drinking cocktails with strained (it was initially a luxury) for a cocktail but after this became the standard way of drinking it.

Ice created a need for a whole new set of skills to mix with. So bartending golden age came about. People like Williard pioneered making individual drinks to order, created new iced drinks.

This iced style of American drink became the international style of drink - American bars popped around the world (70 or so years before US Prohibition; not driven entirely by Prohibition). In Paris by 1860 there were 5-6 American bars, also in Argentina, Melbourne, Sydney, London. Sort of the drink of the (pre-)jet-set, the world travelers.

Then drinks became invented locally by local American or American-trained bartenders, such as the Pisco Sour. Other hybrid drinks came about, such as the Cuban cocktails. Late 1898 American bartenders rushed in to open bars, expecting a business rush. They refashioned mixology for the local and tourist audience. They invented the idea of putting lots of citrus, pineapple juice in Cuba.

Around 1900s Bronx cocktail invented. It was the Cosmopolitan of its day. (It contains gin, vermouth, orange juice- a new cocktail ingredient.) It opened the door for Cuban-style drinks to come into the US. Daiquiri showed up after that in US in 1910s. (Introduced the idea of small glass of sour- previously if you wanted a lot of citrus you'd have a punch.)

Before 1920 tequila was a curiosity in North America at best. Prohibition brought tequila drinks into US.Then the Margarita came after.

That's as far as we got- not bad for an hour and a half-hour seminar!

 

Make Easter Egg Ice for Easter

Check out this post from a few years back on making ice shaped like Easter eggs. 

Short answer: water balloons. 

The Ice King of the Internet

I was interviewed recently for a story in a magazine for the iPad/iPhone called The Magazine.

During the interview we were joking that I'm the Ice King of the Internet. The quote didn't make it into the story, but I've adopted that as an official title. Hail your new king! 

 

In the story, writer Alison Hallet covers the history of ice in drinks, current ice machines, how bars are using big ice, and how to make big ice at home (with my cooler strategy). I get too much credit for bringing an iceberg from Newfoundland to last year's seminar at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic (that honor belongs to Wayne Curtis), but as long as my glory is increased it is for the greater good.  

A preview of the story is here, but you'll have to subscribe ($1.99) to get the whole thing. Or sign up for a free 7-day trial, read everything, then decide whether or not to cancel before the week is up. Looks like they have a good amount of booze coverage. 

 

Ice Info for New Readers

Hello new readers - The best of the ice posts are:

- How to make clear ice using a cooler

- How to make giant crystal clear ice cubes

Then some fun projects with ice are here and here and here and here. 

Making Clear Ice Using a Blast Freezer

A few weeks back I was talking to Charles Joly, beverage director of The Aviary in Chicago, about ice. (This happens a lot.) We were talking about the cooler method I use to make clear ice. 

The Aviary has a Clinebell machine that makes 300 pound blocks of sexy, clear ice that they then cut up into various shapes for drinks, so they don't need to use the slow-ass cooler method, BUT they also have a blast freezer.

I'd always wondered if you could make clear ice fast using the cooler method in a blast freezer, and luckily Joly was curious as well, so he gave it a try.

He said:

The cooler was a 10qt Rubbermaid with the lid off. Time was about 13 hours at a low of -40F and on average a bit warmer than that (-30-40F), as the blast freezer was opened and closed during service.

I was surprised it didn't freeze the entire block in that time. As you can see from the side view, it was about 60% frozen with side walls and a thin top layer beginning to form.

I cracked off the soft shell from the bottom, drained off the water and knocked of the thin side walls that were holding the pool of water. The remaining block had good clarity. 

I would say the clarity is relatively close- say 85% that of the clinebell. 

In conclusion, he says: 

For home use or a one-off event, this ice is great. For venue use, we would need a lot of coolers. The Clinebell provides our hand chipped ice spheres (large, one rock per glass) and our ice shards that go into every glass of water served.

I think the technique is awesome for the home bartender, if you're doing punch service or simply as an alternative, although much more labor intensive and lower yielding, than the Clinebell.

So yes, it works. And maybe if you don't need too much block ice and have a blast freezer with space in it this could actually be useful. Just not at The Aviary. 

Thanks for the effort, Charles!

A Dramatic Video About Ice from The Aviary

Here's a video from Chicago's molecular mixology bar The Aviary with cool slow-motion shots of ice. 

 

Another Way to Make Clear Ice at Home

I am honored to have as Alcademics readers people who are just as huge cocktail nerds as I am. Many take on projects that I run out of time to do, pass along better information to me, or fill me in on the science I'm missing.

Kevin Liu, who has recently started the blog Craft Cocktails at Home and also blogs at ScienceFare.org, tested a method of making clear ice that another reader left in blog comments. 

In this post, he discusses the science of clear ice and two methods to make it at home.

1. The Igloo Cooler method, pioneered here on Alcademics.
2. The High-Temperature Freezing method, in which you let water freeze into ice at just below the freezing temperature. It's also simple, and depending on your freezer may not take up as much space.

Read the post for more info.