Category: ice

Rainbow Mini Ice Balls

I purchased a couple of ice cube trays online and made rainbow ice for Pride.

I bought the trays on Amazon. The Hutzler 324 Ball Ice Tray makes 1-inch sized ice balls. It seems pretty good so far though I'm not certain of its longevity.

The Mydio 40 Tray makes small marble-sized ice balls of about half an inch in diameter. It's made of high-quality silicone and seems super sturdy.

Neither make clear ice (that's my jam, as you know), but the size of ice they make is very fun.

To make the colored ice balls I used either commercial food coloring or natural colorings like turmeric and hibiscus.

Then I just stacked them up in a glass in rainbow order. Silly, fun.

June 27, 2019
What to Try When Directional Freezing Doesn’t Produce Clear Ice
If you're trying directional freezing and still not getting clear ice, here are a few considerations.

Know What's Reasonable.

Directional Freezing doesn't get rid of any cloudiness in ice, it just moves it toward one end of your cube/block. You will always have about 15-30 percent cloudy ice as the last part of the ice freezes (if you allow it to freeze all the way).

Motion or Vibration.

While your ice is freezing are you moving the container around? Does your freezer shake and vibrate? Are you opening and slamming the door shut a lot? Any sort of motion tends to knock air bubbles together, and they float up and stick to the bottom of ice as it's freezing downwards, often leading to little bubble trails and starburst-shaped groups of bubbles. The more vibration, the more bubbles/cloudy bits form.

Super Cold Freezers.

A friend of mine couldn't get his ice balls all the way clear using the thermos method. After much back and forth, we realized that he has a super fancy freezer set to super duper cold. The ice ball froze so quickly from all sides that it didn't have a chance to push the cloudy parts out the bottom of the ice ball mold into the thermos.

In general, the warmer your freezer (but still below freezing, obviously), the clearer the ice – but you still want to be food safe (below 0 Fahrenheit or -18 Celsius). As far as I know, the Igloo cooler method should still work in a very cold freezer, but some thinner vessels will freeze from the outside-in rather than in one direction.

Some Tips to Improve Clarity.

If your ice is pretty clear but you've become obsessed with making it ridiculously clear and minimizing the cloudy part at the end of the block (it happens), a few things you can try are:
- Unscrew the aerator off your sink faucet (and put it back on after; it saves water waste).
- Run it through a water filter. Even though direction freezing acts as a filter, pushing minerals and other impurities into the last part of the ice to freeze, you can reduce the mineral/impurity content by using water from the pitcher.
- The reason I run my water through a filter is to remove chlorine/chloramine tastes in the water. I don't care about the minute improvement, if any, in clarity, but I find that if I use unfiltered water when I pop the block out of the cooler there's a big release of chlorine smell. Blech.
- Boil the water. In my opinion, this isn't worth the effort or energy waste, but it can improve clarity ever so slightly. Boiling water should reduce trapped air.
These tips shouldn't make radical, but small, improvements in your ice's clarity.

To read all the ice posts here on Alcademics, check out the Index of Ice Experiments.
November 21, 2018
Ice Advice: The Right Way to Store Ice in the Freezer

Ice in the freezer can absorb smells from both the freezer and the refrigerator, to the surprise of many people. Ice can also sublimate (evaporate) and shrink fairly quickly. So you can either place your ice in a sealed bag/container, and/or do the same with your food.

In my fridge/freezer situation, I don't leave any food unwrapped so that the ice never absorbs food smells. I used to stick leftover pizza in the box in the fridge and by the next morning my ice would taste ever so slightly of it, so now I put the pizza in a Tupperware-type container. There doesn't seem to be any problem with uncooked vegetables stored in there (not smelly onions or garlic or anything), but cooked food is problematic.

For ice that you're going to be storing, I recommend either Ziplock style sealed bags or Tupperware-style containers. Those keep it sealed from sublimating and from absorbing smells. Easy.

If you want to see just how permeable ice is, add a drop of food coloring on top of a big block and watch how it flows into the cube along invisible cracks.

image from Ziplock.com

To read all the ice posts here on Alcademics, check out the Index of Ice Experiments.

November 19, 2018
Spiders and Insect Ice Balls for Halloween

I'm a sucker for an ice gimmick, so with Halloween approaching I made some clear ice balls with insects from the dollar store frozen inside.

As usual, I used the method revealed here on Alcademics, using a Thermos Funtainer and 2.5 inch ice ball molds upside-down. Read about how to do that here.

The plastic insects I bought from the dollar store, made in China, so they're most definitely not approved for food use. I'll serve them to myself but don't recommend non-food-safe products at a bar. (Given that I'm freezing rather than heating them, a thorough wash is good enough for me at home.)

So, here they are:

A fly in a clear ice ball.

October 28, 2018
More Ice Ball Shenanigans

If you're not following alcademics on Instagram… well you really should be. I've been having some fun over there freezing stuff into ice balls. I'm using the same technique you've seen here on Alcademics before – a thermos and an upside-down ice ball mold.

Lately I did a couple fun ones with money, which I'd never serve to a real person because money is filthy.

I did a few with jalapenos for one event, and some with mint for another event. (Also some blue ones for it.)

And for gay pride, I made some ones with rainbow flags. I printed out and laminated some rainbow flags, and then froze those inside the ice spheres.

If you're looking for more amazing ice projects, check out the Index of Ice Experiments.

Any suggestions on other things to freeze inside clear ice balls?

June 26, 2018
The Future of San Francisco Cocktails (Predicted By Me) in San Francisco Magazine

It has been many years since I have contributed to San Francisco Magazine, but now I'm back! In the new February Bars & Nightlife issue, I have ten stories loosely themed around "Future proofing the cocktail: How Bay Area drink makers are reinventing our favorite alcoholic beverages."

Below is the intro with links to all ten stories and brief intros from me.

Two decades into the Bay Area’s cocktail awakening, you’d think that bars would have settled into a comfortable middle age—the imbibing equivalent of staying home to Netflix and chill. But you’d be wrong.

Creativity stirs all over the region, and drink makers and bar owners continue to spin out new ways to stay relevant and keep us guessing: with secret menus, popup concepts, and menu launch parties; with vibrant drinks, exotic ingredients, and bar-specific spirits; with quality concoctions served at double the speed, thanks to newfangled juices and outsourced ice. And to meet the expanding demand for quality, novelty, and expediency in booze consumption, new clusters of great bars have sprung up not just in the East Bay but also to the north and south. These changes are often nuanced but pervasive, taking place across many bars in many precincts throughout the ever-thirsty Bay Area.

Scanning the cocktail horizon, you can spot the big ideas and the small revisions that are changing the way we drink in 2018 and beyond. Here are 10 of them.

Bartenders Are Going Straight to the Source

How bartenders are directing spirits creation from distillers.

Forget The Simple Description: These Are Very Complicated Cocktails

A look into the mind of Adam Chapman from The Gibson.

Wine Country Has An Unofficial Cocktail AVA

Drinks at the fantastic Duke's and other Healdsburg cocktail bars.

The Future (and Present, Actually) Is Female

Who runs the bars? Girls. A sampling of ten women running things in Bay Area Bars.

Asian Restaurants Are the Center of Cocktail Innovation

Once the home of sake bombs and soju immitations of real drinks, now Asian restaurants are some of the most forward-looking.

Viking Drinks Are So Hot Right Now

Aquivit will be everywhere in 2018.

You'll Be Spending the Night in San Jose

Paper Plane and other great bars in San Jose.

Your Highball Intake Is About to Increase Dramatically

Whiskey and other highballs are happening.

Outsourcing Is In

Blind Tiger Ice and Super Jugoso are going to have a major impact on prep work in SF bars.

The Mission Has Only Just Begun

So, so many new bars are opening in the Mission District.

I've already got my next assignment for San Francisco Magazine, so hopefully this will be a regular thing.

February 3, 2018
Directional Freezing, Freeze Distillation, and an 1890 Story About Ice Purity

Ice nerds will recall that directional freezing is a method for making clear ice by forcing the water to freeze in one direction, rather than from the outside-in as in a typical ice cube tray.

It's also pretty similar to, if not the same thing as, freeze distillation – using freezing to separate liquids. Freeze distillation is the method by which early American applejack was made: take a cider and freeze it, scoop off the frozen ice, and then you have a more concentrated cider, higher in alcohol. Keep doing this and eventually you get something pretty high proof.

This was also the process used by BrewDog to make their high-proof Tactical Nuclear Penguin beer.

Experimenting with directional freezing shows that when using the process, the clear ice freezes first and the air and any minerals in the water are treated as impurities, pushed away from the point of freezing. But as many people have found out, it treats everything not pure water in the same way – when you try to add food coloring or a flavoring to the cooler in a directional freezing system, unless you put a ton of it in the color is treated as an impurity and your ice still comes out clear. (The bottom/last part to freeze will be gooped up with the color/flavor. )

Jim Blakey of the ClearlyFrozen ice cube tray found a story in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, that talks about how clear ice less polluted than the lake water from which its formed. I'd assume this is for the same reason.

“clear ice from polluted sources may contain so small a percentage of the impurities of the source, that it may not be regarded as injurious to the health."

Here's the story.

The original reference in Google Books is here.

January 9, 2018
Directional Freezing, as a Patent Law Exam Question
As readers of this site know, I figured out "directional freezing" – the process of making clear ice by controlling the direction in which water freezes – in 2009 and first posted it here on Alcademics.

I had always assumed that I couldn't patent the process because it's something that happens naturally (like how ponds and lakes freeze), but perhaps could have patented a device for producing clear ice cubes had I been entrepreneurial enough. (As you know, many such devices now exist.)

Well, this question became an exam question from Jason Rantanen, Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law.

On this post on the website Patentlyo.com, he talked about the test as he proposed a hypothetical:
Camper English was the first person to discover that clear ice could be produced in a home freezer by freezing the ice in a directional manner. English published these findings on a weblog on December 28, 2009, a copy of which you were provided in Appendix A. English immediately filed a patent application that contained the following claim.

I claim:
1. A method of producing ice comprising freezing water in a directional manner in a home freezer.
Analyze the patentability of the claim under current patent eligible subject matter law.
The rest of the test question involved the Wintersmith's clear ice maker. Keep reading the post for more info an an image from the patent application. It's pretty interesting.

Rantanen didn't provide the answer on the Patentlyo website, but he did give me permission to post a rough technical explanation of the answer, with the understanding that the below does not constitute legal advice:

The full answer involves application of an analytical framework that the U.S. Supreme Court articulated a few years ago in a case called Alice v. CLS Bank. Basically, you first ask whether the patent claim is "directed to" an unpatentable concept like a law of nature or physical phenomena. If it is, you then ask whether the patent claim adds an "inventive concept": basically, something that transforms the claim into something more than just a claim to natural law itself. A formalistic addition isn't enough: saying "I claim the process of risk-hedging, done on a computer" or limiting it to a particular technological field, such as ice-making, isn't enough.

In this case, claiming the concept of directional freezing would fail the eligible subject matter requirement since it's a natural law or physical phenomena. Even limiting it to being done in a home freezer is very unlikely to be enough of an inventive concept. However, claiming a specific process for making clear ice could be sufficient. For example, a claim to "a method of producing clear ice by placing water in vessel that is insulated on every side except the top and placing that ice into a home freezer" would likely be enough to satisfy the patent eligible subject matter requirement. There's a neat recent case that my students would have been aware of called Rapid Litigation Management v. CellzDirect that involved a process of freezing and unfreezing liver cells. The Federal Circuit (the Federal appeals course that hears appeals in patent cases) held that that particular method did constitute patent eligible subject matter.

The Wintersmith device on the other hand strikes me as a pretty clear application of natural principles. I doubt anyone would be able to mount a serious patent eligible subject matter challenge to that patent.

All that said, there's still the issue of whether or not the invention is new. If someone else described the same process then the process wouldn't be patentable. But newness is a different issue that's governed by a different set of rules.

Got all that? Sure you do. Me too :)

In any case it's awesome that after all these years I got an answer for a lingering question about The Blog Post That Launched A Hundred Ice Cube Trays.
January 8, 2018
Making Clear Ice with the Clearly Frozen Ice Cube Tray
While I'm not going to get in the habit of testing out every clear ice cube maker on the market, I decided to try out the Clearly Frozen tray because they sent me one.

This ice cube tray uses directional freezing, the process to make clear ice first described here on Alcademics back in 2009. This particular system is pretty much the same as in this blog post about poking holes in silicone ice cube trays and using directional freezing to ensure the part inside the tray is clear. The difference is that in the Clearly Frozen device, the shape of the 'cooler' is custom made to fit the ice cube tray and retaining tray.

The device is just three parts: a 10-cube silicone ice cube tray (makes 10 2-inch cubes at a time), a plastic retaining tray to hold the cloudy ice beneath the tray, and the foam insulated box that enforces directional freezing. You put it together, fill it with water, and leave it to freeze. My timing was perfect at a little over 12 hours of freezing – there was still plenty of unfrozen water in the plastic tray so it was easy to separate.

Pros:
- Makes more cubes than most clear ice cube trays on the market – ten 2" cubes
- More space-efficient relatively than others – it takes up a bunch of space, but you get more ice out of it than with other clear ice makers
- Costs less than others- $25 including shipping
Cons:
- I have no complaints for my first attempt, but I do have some doubts about its long-term durability. The interior clear tray is quite thin and I could see it cracking. 2019 update: They have updated the interior tray with a much thicker and more durable plastic, so it seems this tray will last a long time.
Personally I will probably continue to to make my ice one big Igloo cooler at a time, because I enjoy the process of breaking up an ice block and don't care that much about having super-square ice cubes. But of the commercial products I've tried, this one has a low price and some nice features.
December 26, 2017
Ice Tips in Southwest Airlines Magazine

If you're traveling in December on Southwest, you may notice an illustration of an ice ball with a strawberry in it. That's based on a real strawberry inside a real ice ball, that you may have seen here on Alcademics.

I don't see the story online, so I'll post it below.

For more information on how to make awesome ice balls with stuff inside them, check out this post and this post, and of course the Index of Ice Experiments here on Alcademics.

Thanks to writer Michael Cook for writing the story and thanks to my friends who spotted it in magazine and snapped pictures for me!

December 13, 2017