Category: ice

For the 20th anniversary issue of Imbibe Magazine (to which I have subscribed all 20 years, and written for a few times), Wayne Curtis wrote a story on my work on and solution to creating clear ice at home.

Among these was Camper English. A spirits writer based in San Francisco with a background in science, he was curious about the physics of clear ice. By the 1990s, commercial outfits were producing large blocks of clear ice for banquet and wedding sculptors. In New York, clear cubes were sold wholesale to bars. But how to do this at home? “I decided to just test some stuff out systematically, not expecting to actually figure anything out,” English says.

His early experiments included the “freeze twice” theory, and he published the results on his blog, Alcademics. (“I repeated the freezing something like 12 times,” he reported. “It’s not getting any clearer, folks.”) He started with hot water and then very cold water, and set his freezer at various temperatures. He tried carbonated water, “which made the cloudiest of ice.” The results were always the same.

Read the story here!

Unless you’re an extreme ice nerd like me, you probably don’t know that hard sided cooler manufacturers change their models. The first cooler I used to create clear ice was discontinued, but I was able to switch to a similar model .I think the Coleman Party Stacker line went away, and maybe a small model I like as well.

A year or so ago I was in Target and bought a $10 hard sided cooler, because it was so cheap. The cooler should be bad for making clear ice because it is narrower on the bottom than the top, so when using it for directional freezing and the ice freezes from the top down to the bottom, the ice will expand. This cooler is slightly tapered so that the bottom is narrower than the top – likely if I let a block freeze solid in here it will crack. But so far I’ve made two slabs in it, allowing it to freezer for 3 or so days, and the shape has worked to my advantage- the ice pops right out of the cooler probably due to that same tapered shape.

I was excited to come tell everybody to buy this model of cooler (from brand Sun Squad, probably a Target house brand), but there’s no trace of it on their site – so it too is discontinued.

Anyway, a good thing to know is that you can sometimes find hard sided coolers at thrift shops.