For this article on Liquor.com, writer Audrey Morgan interviewed Don Lee and I extensively.
Whether it’s the mountain of crushed ice on a Mint Julep or a single oversized rock in an Old Fashioned, the right ice can set the right mood, and take a drink from good to great.
“Ice serves several functions in a cocktail,” says Camper English, a pioneer of clear ice and the author of The Ice Book. “It chills and dilutes them and it can also look so good that it functions as a garnish.”
I had a little unexpected treat today, when I saw The Ice Book mentioned in this story "Is Ice the Ultimate Luxury?" in T, the New York Times Magazine.
This is the third time the New York Times has written about my little book on ice cubes!
I wrote a story for the San Francisco Chronicle about cobblers, mostly Sherry Cobblers. Read it here.
While hot weather bears down on much of the country, summer in San Francisco is more of a state of mind than a change in the weather. And many bartenders around the city are addressing the abstract concept of hot temperatures by placing cooling, ice-filled cobblers on their seasonal drink lists.
At new downtown venues the Dawn Club and Heartwood, the drink appeared on their opening menus; at Pacific Cocktail Haven, also downtown, and Canteen, in Menlo Park, the cobbler joined the list for the season; and bartenders at the Treasury in the Financial District are swapping out their spring sipper for a new summer variation.
The cobbler, a century-old low-ABV classic, most likely takes its name from the cobblestone-shaped pebble ice used in the drink. Along with the julep, the cobbler helped popularize American-style iced cocktails around the world, as well as the use of the drinking straw.
After reading my book Doctors and Distillers, Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking) pointed out to me that proof of distillation in ancient India (supposedly from the fifth century BCE) is not as well established as previously thought. Many histories on distillation cite work from 1979 that claims that elephant head stills were found along with other equipment that shows that there was alcoholic distillation in Northern India this early.
McGee recommended that I look at the book An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions by James McHugh. I added it as a suggestion that the SF Public Library should pick up, and thankfully they did. When it arrived recently, I took it out.
The book is dense and academic, and I decided that I wouldn't have time to read all of it. So instead I just searched for the sections on distillation. There were only a couple.
McHugh writes, "… the evidence for early stills in South Asia is more questionable than is often assumed…. John Marshall's 'still' excavated at Taxila was not found as a connected assemblage; Marshall assembled it himself from quite disparate finds, no doubt on the model of contemporaneous stills, in order to explain the function of just one of the vessels. Allchin [the 1979 reference that's referred to in places such as the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails] built on Marshall's hypothesis regarding the function of these vessels, and his textual evidence is not convincing. Allchin likewise did not find a still assemblage but rather a large number of one type of vessel, with very few other parts."
"The earliest explicit description of alcoholic distillation that I am aware of is from a medical text… dating from around 1200 CE…. It is absolutely clear that distillation is described here and that the liquid distilled is a fermented, sugar-based drink…. An important point to note here is that, when Sanskrit texts mention alcoholic distillation, they are quite clear about it, using specific vocabulary."
Note that at the end of the 1100s is when we first find real evidence of alcoholic distillation in southern Italy as well. McHugh notes that the distilled spirit is distilled medicine, not beverage alcohol. This is in line with distillation in Europe at this time.
Later text references to alcoholic distillation pop up at the end of the 1200s in Indian texts, and now refer to recreational drinking. Note: nonalcoholic distillation in the West dates to probably 300CE; Arabs were distilling rosewater after I believe the year 700, but as I wrote in Doctors and Distillers, it doesn't seem that even if/when they distilled wine, they concentrated the alcohol with heads/tails cuts, so it was closer to filtration.
In a later chapter, McHugh mentions a book "The Elucidation of Distillates (Arkaprakasa), dating from the seventeenth century CE or later, is a treatise on distilled medicines." That might be a fun book for me to find if it has been translated into English sometime.
Anyway, I thought this was interesting.
I wrote a story for Distiller Magazine about the various ways to implement a big ice program. It was written with distilleries (that have sampling bars) in mind – they often have a lot of floor space, but even those with distillery bars don't often have a ton of freezer space.
I tried to be cognizant of the specific needs of distilleries, the possibility for take-out ice sales, and the notion that maybe if it's easy you could just buy it.
In this experiment, I started with ice spheres made in a thermos. These come out pretty great in general, but not perfect.
So I decided to compare smoothing them to see if I could make them perfectly round and with a smooth surface using these Cocktail Kingdom ice ball presses.
The large first one, as you can see, is too big for the ice sphere, and although the surface becomes smooth, it’s still kind of egg shaped. (You can also see the initial ice sphere was a little cloudy- I think the fan was blowing on it in my freezer; I should know better.)
The smaller second ice ball press, on the other hand, comes out a bunch smaller, but it’s a perfect ping pong ball sized sphere. 
If only I had one in between the two sizes! 65mm I think would be about right.
Wow, another story about The Ice Book, this time from Huffington Post.
I love how they made the pictures pop with the framing.
Just for fun I bought an ice shaver (raspador de hielo) off of Amazon. I didn’t particularly need one, I just wanted to try it.
It is used to make flavored shaved ices around the world. (Or Mint Juleps in my world.) To use it you slide it across a slab of ice and a blade on the bottom shaves it and collects it inside.
There’s absolutely no reason to use clear ice for this but that’s all I have at home 🙂
I used it to make a flat surface on slab of clear ice. When you make slabs of ice in the cooler, the bottom side in particular is a bit wavy after you dump out its contents. So using the shaver I made it all even, and then so that it has a smooth surface I smoothed it with a thaw plate. (You can just use the bottom of a pot, back of an ice designer plate, or other flat metal.)
"San Francisco's Camper English invented a home method for making clear ice that's now celebrated around the world"
is the dek to this story in the San Jose Mercury News with the headline "‘The Ice Book’ traces a cocktail writer’s obsession with designing perfect, diamond-clear ice".
The story is only available to subscribers unfortunately, but here is one of the photos by Karl Mondon. It's so dorky I love it.
Update: The story got syndicated so it appeared in lots of publications and you can read one of them here.
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