Author: Camper English
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An Attempt at Recreating the Canned Water Method for Clear Ice
Trying to replicate making clear ice by “canning” water.
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An Attempt at Clear Spheres with an Upside-Down Thermos
Alcademics reader Andy L commented on the post about how to Make Clear Ice Balls Using a Thermos with an idea: Fill the ice ball with water and set the thermos upside-down on top of it like a dunce cap. This way the ice ball mold would still be insulated on the top half: Would…
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The Use of Fixatives in Tea-Flavored Gin: A Chat with Gerald Rowland of Coit Spirits
It's a welcome exception to the hundreds of National Mimosa Day and other generic pitches about liquor I receive to get an email from someone who wants to talk technical details of production, and this post comes from one of them. Gerald Rowland of Rowland Cellars and more relevantly Coit Spirits sent me an email…
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Canning Water to Degas it for Clearer Ice
Today's post comes from the work of reader Richard Newell. We'll call it the "canned water" technique for improving ice clarity. We know that the cloudiness in ice comes mostly from trapped air and impurities, which usually are pushed to the center of an ice cube when it freezes. The technique of directional freezing just…
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Cherries Frozen Into Ice Balls
This came out great! Using this technique with the Thermos Funtainer and ice ball molds I put some cherries inside ice ball molds atop the Thermos and froze them. Nothing complicated, these looked awesome. For all the clear ice projects on Alcademics, check out the Index of Ice Experiments page.
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Ice Blocks with Objects: Sharks and Sunglasses
While sheltering-in-place at home, I've taken to doing some (more) silly ice projects. For these I used the basic Igloo cooler method and placing objects near the top of the water line so that they'd freeze into the clear part of the ice after freezing. For the sunglasses, I rested a stick over the top…
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A New Book on Chartreuse Corrects the History of the Brand
Turns out, they were wrong about some stuff.
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My Favorite (Nerdiest) Blog Posts About Cognac
In which I gather together my best writing on cognac.
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Dilution and Additives in Cognac (Hine Series Part 6)
In this post, I’ll talk about diluting and additives used in cognac. There is a lot that happens in between taking cognac out of a barrel and being sealed up in a bottle.
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Mocktail Thesaurus – Alternatives for the Word Mocktail
A list of 60+ long list of alternative terms for “mocktail.”