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  • Another Clue to Ice Clarity: Slow Freezing Like a Japanese Pond

    The other night a friend of mine told me that she read something about clear ice, which as you may recall is a topic of interest of this blog. Naturally I forgot what she said (we were at a bar, remember) but the next day I found the following email I had sent to myself:

    "Clear ice old japan sawdust"

    The amazing thing is that when you put that into Google the very first story it comes up with is what I assume is the exact thing my friend was talking about. In this story on natural ice (popsicles) in Japan, a person in the story gives a quote that could prove useful. 

    Masao Yoshiara, the fourth-generation president of the company, said: "In Nikko, the daily lowest temperature in winter averages around minus 10 C, ideal for making crystal-clear ice.

    "If it's colder than that, ice can be made quickly but it is not solid enough. Here, ice grows 1 centimeter thicker a day. When ice becomes about 15 centimeters thick over half a month, we cut out ice blocks. If an ice block is thicker than that, it contains cracks."

    Minus 10 degrees Celsius is 14 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know the temperature of my home freezer, but it's worth investing in a thermometer to find out. Perhaps slow freezing equals clearer ice.

    The other factor we'll have to consider about pond ice is that the bottom never freezes. Thus the air that is a major factor in cloudy ice is still in the warmer water below the surface layer of the ice.

    This is another strategy I've been considering in attempting to get clear ice in the freezer: if I place a good insulator at the bottom and sides of the water container that doesn't cool down nearly as fast as the water (for example a super thick glass bowl, or a pan of ice that sits on a stone surface), will that cause all the air in the water to migrate to the bottom and freeze last?

    This reading inspires a lot more ice experiments to come. I'm glad I emailed myself from the bar.

    An index of ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

  • Does Freezing Water in Layers Make Clear Ice?

    Here's a new edition in my ongoing ice experiments. So far, there experiments have been:

    With successes in:

    So far my conclusions have been that (at least with my San Francisco water), temperature and filtering have less of an effect than trapped air that migrates to the center of the freezing cube. Thus I am trying to minimize this effect.

    In this experiment I froze ice in layers in small lasagna pans to see if we had a maximized surface area, hopefully no air would get trapped in the ice and form cloudy parts. Apparently some commercial ice machines such as Kold Draft spray an upside-down mist of water in layers, so this would be the home approximation of that.

    I tried this experiments with tiny layers, medium layers, and large layers in the same sized pan, the difference being that I added more water per layer. I let the water freeze before adding another layer.

    As you can see, none of the layers turned out clear:

    (Tiny layers, medium layers, and large layers left to right.)

    The small sized layers were made only adding a couple of ounces of water at a time, so I can't get much smaller layers than these unless I use a spray bottle. 

    We'll have to call this one a failure. Freezing water in layers does not appear to make clear ice, just ice with smaller layers of trapped air.

    Below is a closeup of the layers for your ice ogling enjoyment.

    Threelayerscloseup

    An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

  • Passing the B.A.R.

    This past fall I took the B.A.R., Beverage Alcohol Resource, five-day course in New York. The course has two levels- "Ready" and "Certified", with the only difference in the number of drinks one has to make within a certain time on the practical bartending exam. The course ran for about 12 hours each day for the first four days, with nearly a full day of testing on the last day. It was a real butt-kicker.

    People seemed to come away with different impressions of the course, but what stuck out most to me was what you need to know not just to pass the class, but to say that you're at an expert level in the industry. It's a lot. You need to know:

    1. The science and history of fermentation and distillation from the dawn of time
    2. The history, ingredients, geography, and practical and legal production rules for every major category of spirits
    3. The entire history of bartending and individual history and timelines of dozens of important cocktails
    4. How to blind taste and identify spirits, quality of distillation, barrel type and age, and other production parameters, down to individual brands and bottlings
    5. How to balance drinks, mix drinks, make them fast and of the highest quality possible while providing top quality customer service
    6. How to create new drinks and tweak existing ones based on different mixological strategies
    7. How to blind taste and critique cocktails

    I took 76 pages of notes in those four days, after having read and studied the textbook, attended dozens on lectures by the instructors, read zillions of books, and passed the BAR Smarts course before the course. We sampled a few hundred spirits blind, I practiced bartending until my shoulder ached from shaking, and still tried to find time to study each night before passing out.

    I decided to attempt the BAR Ready certification, thinking that I knew so much about the history and production rules of spirits that I wouldn't have to even study for that part of the test. (Boy was I wrong about that.) Luckily if you don't make all your drinks in time to be BAR Ready you can still pass BAR Certified. And I did, which is awesome.

    My takeaway from the course is not just the new information and skill set gained during the week, but knowing what it takes to stay on top of things going forward: A great and constant amount of work tasting, testing, practicing, learning, and reviewing what you think you already know.

  • SF Cocktail Geography

    Sfist_logo Jay Barmann from SFist.com attended my talk at SF Chefs.Food.Wine and kept the handout. Today he's posted my categorization of nearly every type of cocktail program in the city, which is good, because formatting html is a pain.

    The categories I made up so don't get too hung up on them- it's just how I see them.

    Read it here. 

    I've been thinking of giving that talk again, because PowerPoint is forever. Let me know if you're into it and maybe I can put something together.

  • Cutting Corners to Make Clear Ice

    In an ongoing set of experiments I've been trying to make clear ice at home. I've tried:

    With some success on the last one. While what would be ideal would be to produce one giant solid block of perfectly clear ice, I haven't figured that out yet. However if the ice is going to be used to shake with or for cooling individual beverages, you don't need a giant block- just big chunks.

    There is a way to accomplish this by cutting corners. And tops and bottoms. We've seen how the air bubble makes the cloudiest part of the ice in the center in vertically-frozen water, and mostly along the bottom of horizontally-frozen water.

    making clear ice

     And I've also found that horizontally-frozen water usually has an edge of very clear ice.

    Clear ice around the edges of the pan of ice

    So with my ice pick, I just cut off the clear edges separated the top from the cloudy bottom
     of the pan ice (easier than you'd expect, as the cloudy ice breaks off easily), and cut around the cloudy middle of vertically-frozen water to end up with a big bowl of clear ice.

    a bowl of very clear ice

    Conclusions: You can make clear ice by cutting around cloudy ice frozen in large blocks. However, you waste about 85% of your ice, and a lot of time.

    An index of ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

  • Making Clear Ice by Releasing Trapped Air

    [update: after this post, I figured out the trick to making clear ice – check here for the solution.]

    Finally, I've got a minor success in my clear ice experiment to share. So far in an attempt to make perfectly clear ice in my home freezer, I've tried:

    Noting that water freezes into ice from the outside-in, leaving an air/water bubble that forms the cloudy part of ice, I sought to devise a way to either change the way ice freezes, or to release the trapped air while the ice was freezing.

    First I tried laying a bar spoon diagonally through the water. The theory was that the metal of the spoon might conduct coldness into the center of the ice so that the ice would freeze more evenly. The intended result was a dispersed air throughout the ice rather than just in the bottom/center layer. 

    Spoonwaterandice

    But alas, the intended result did not happen. There does appear to be more air dispersed in the ice, but still the majority of it is in a layer along the bottom.

    Next I tried inserting a straw into the center of a tray of ice to see if the air would escape through the straw. The plan was flawed to begin with, as water would probably just freeze inside the straw so no air could get out.

    Strawwaterandice

    In reality the freezing ice pushed the straw up so that it was only inserted about half an inch into the ice by the time it was fully frozen. This had no effect on the amount of cloudiness.

    For something that did work, keep reading after the jump.

    (more…)

  • Clear Ice and Container Shape

    Today is Ice Day on Alcademics, so stay tuned for more exciting coverage of my ongoing experiments to make clear ice in my home freezer.

    So far, I've tried:

    So far I haven't achieved… anything, but I'm gathering information that should help in the future. In recent experiments, I found that ice freezes from the outside in, which is sort of obvious, but it's important because that's where all the air is trapped that makes the majority of cloudiness in ice. So I wanted to try some different container shapes to test how and where the air bubble forms. 

    In a vertical container, such as these Vietnamese take-out soup containers I've been using, the air bubble forms toward the middle-bottom. (I've set the ice upside-down in this picture.)

    Vertical1s

    Whereas in a flat horizontal container such as a lasagna tray, the air bubble forms in a layer across the bottom of the pan.

    Icepan1s

    The experiment continues after the jump.

    (more…)

  • Does Carbonated Water Make Clearer Ice than Still Water?

    This is another in my ongoing experiments to make clear ice. So far, I've tried comparing:

    Someone in the comments mentioned hearing that carbonated water would freeze more clearly than still water. As most of the cloudiness in ice appears to come from trapped oxygen, this didn't make sense to me, but I figured it couldn't hurt to try.

    I froze equal amounts of still water and carbonated water and this is how they came out:

    Tapvscarbonated

    The carbonated water is on the right, and it sure as heck isn't clear. It's got kind of a fun texture with lots of air bubbles in it, but that doesn't get us anywhere for the purposes of this experiment.

    Conclusion: Carbonated water does not make clearer ice than still water.

    An index of ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

  • Nice Ice in the News

    The Associated Press released the following story on ice today, with a quote from your favorite icesperimentator Camper English. The whole story is here.

    SIP: Bartending trend calls for nice ice, baby

    By MICHELLE LOCKE
    Associated Press Writer

    SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Erik Adkins spends a lot of time on ice.

    As general manager of the Heaven's Dog bar in San Francisco he's very particular about what ice goes into his cocktails, preferring hand-carved chunks for slow-sipping drinks and oversized clear cubes for lighter concoctions.

    And that's just the tip of the ice trend.

    Driven by the same quest for perfection that elevated bread, cheese and wine to objects of desire, ice has entered an epicurean age, coming in new shapes and sizes.

    Then I get the closing quote:

    On the other hand there's Camper English, a San Francisco-based writer and cocktail expert, who has blogged about his search for clarity, melting and refreezing ice at home to see if that decreases cloudiness and experimenting with distilled water.

    So far he hasn't been too successful, but that hasn't curbed his enthusiasm.

    "Ice is one of the fun projects that cocktail nerds can play with at home," he says.

    He'll go to some lengths for a chill thrill.

    "One time I caught myself asking a bartender to see their ice when I was making my drink order," he recalls, "because it was going to matter to me."

    Read the whole thing here and see the Index of Ice Experiments on Alcademics here.

  • Does Hot Water Make Clearer Ice Than Cold?

    I have been doing experiments at home to try to get the clearest ice possible. So far my experiments have compared:

    I have not yet had success. Will the third time be the charm?

    (*Update – You might want to skip to this index page to see conclusions reached after many experiments.)

    This time I compared hot water to cold water to see which would freeze more clearly. The theory is that hot/boiled water has less trapped oxygen in it, and thus will freeze clearly because there will be less air bubbles.

    As I previously saw no significant difference in ice clarity between using tap vs. distilled water, I began with unfiltered tap water. One batch of water I left at room temperature. The other batch I boiled for several minutes. I put them in the freezer while the hot water was still hot. Here is what happened on three separate attempts:

    Hotvscold123

    The cold water actually looks a little more clear, but this could be because when the center of the hot water finally froze, it burst. I can't guess why this is because it's not like I have a super refrigerator that freezes ice in ten minutes.

    Another theory about why the first experiment failed is that as the hot water cools down in the freezer, it reabsorbs oxygen and acts just like cold water. To test this, I repeated the experiment, this time covering both plastic tubs with the lid before freezing.

     

    Coveredhotcold12

    Here the hot water ice looks slightly more clear than it did when it was uncovered. However, I'm not seeing a significant difference in hot vs. cold water, though the covered hot water may be just slightly clearer.

    Conclusion: Hot water does not freeze significantly clearer than cold water, even when the vessel is covered to reduce oxygen re-absorption. 

    In all of these ice experiments so far, the major cloudy factor in the ice has not been cloudiness throughout the ice, but a cloudy spot in the center of the ice. This spot is assumed to form due to the order in which ice freezes, from the outside-in. The oxygen migrates to the liquid part (in the middle) until it is the last part to freeze.  Kold-Draft ice machines produce wonderfully clear ice cubes in part because they freeze the ice in layers- water is sprayed in layers from the top down, so that oxygen is never trapped.

    Is there a way to freeze ice in a home freezer similar to a Kold Draft machine? Can we manipulate the way water freezes or change the shape of the container? Can we vibrate the container or stir the water so that the surface stays liquid and freezes last?

    We shall see, in future ice experiments.

    *Update – For a solution to the ice problem, see this post for a method that works. Also, an index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

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