Category: ice

Nearly five years ago I figured out a method to make clear ice blocks in a picnic cooler in what we now call the Directional Freezing or Cooler Method. It works from the top-down. Now a reader has figured out a moderately easy way to freeze in a cooler from the bottom-up. 

An index to all of the ice experiments on Alcademics is here.

In the top-down method, one simply fills an insulated cooler with water and leaves the top off. The water freezes only from the top down, and all the trapped air and impurities are pushed to the bottom, where a cloudy 25% or so will form if you let it freeze that long. 

Freezing From The Bottom-Up

Commercial ice machines like the Clinebell freeze blocks of clear ice by freezing from a cold plate on the bottom, while a water pump near the surface keeps water circulating (thus preventing ice from forming on the surface). 

Reader Nome Park wrote me to tell me about a method he developed that sort of combines these two methods for the home user, producing a mini-Clinebell-type block. 

The cooler is insulated on all sides except for the bottom, and a small aquarium pump is used to keep water circulating at the top. 

The white area on the bottom is the interior of the cooler with the foam/plastic cut off so it's no longer insulated on the bottom.

Requires:

• A big freezer, like a horizontal freezer.
• A larger cooler. He uses a Coleman 20-can Party Stacker cooler, which is taller vertically and thus best for freezing bottom-up
• A small aquaium pump

Method:

1. Cut the cooler bottom outside layers off a few inches up from the bottom. Park did this using a Dremmel tool and a knife. *Important* You only want to cut off the outer plastic and the foam insulation. Do not cut out the interior plastic otherwise it will not hold water. 

2. Insulate the top lid. Park made a 2.5-inch thick piece of foam that fits snuggly inside the cooler (since the lids on these coolers tend not to be insulated. (Pump is just there for scale. It is not attached.)

3. Fill the cooler with water up to where the foam will hit it from the top. 

4. Hang the (unused for your fish tank) aquarium pump from the top, so that it's just beneath the surface of the water. Put the foam piece on top and the lid on that. Park cut a little section out for the pump power cord. 

5. Turn the pump on and wait for it to freeze. In Park's freezer, it takes  2 days and 2 hours to freeze (50 hours) into a block that isn't all the way frozen. If it goes too long (t 72 hours or so) the pump will freeze into the block and probably break.

6. Remove the cooler from the freezer, turn off the cord, turn the cooler upside-down, and wait for the block to slide out. (An hour is about normal). Now you're ready to cut it up. 

I asked Park if he tried this without the pump just to see what happens, but he had not tried it, basing his system on the Clinebell. 

So, for you ambitious sorts with large freezers, this might be a way to make larger blocks than with the small cooler at home. 

Thank you much to reader Nome Park who not only took the time to perfect this method but also to send me detailed description and pictures. 

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Another Way to Make Clear Ice at Home

Recently I posted a method of making perfectly clear ice balls using an insulated mug, which was sent in from Alcademics readers. 

The physics of the thing made perfect sense but I hadn't actually tried it myself at the time. This post is just to say that I use this method now and make nice round ice. Lots and lots of it.

The ice in the picture above isn't cloudy; just some of it is frosty on the outside. 

I use this stainless steel tumbler a small ice ball mold that it sits in. Easy. 

An index of all the ice experiments on Alcademics is here.

You can use the Cooler/Directional Freezing method to make blocks of perfectly clear ice. But those are big blocks and many people want to make clear ice balls. 

Typical ice ball molds make ice that is cloudy in the middle. One reader developed a method to take advantage of directional freezing but it involves using a big pot of water so it's not space-efficient.

The natural next step was to use directional freezing in a small container with an ice ball mold sitting on top.

Thus, the water in the ice ball freezes first, then the cloudy parts are pushed into the water in the insulated container below it, which continues to freeze from the top down. All the water in the ice ball should remain clear. 

I attempted this, ordering insulated mugs and coozies online, but never found one that was the right size. Thankfully, two Alcademics readers were able to find insulated containers that are just right- and send me pictures and answer all my questions. Awesomeness. 

Stainless Steel Tumbler

The one that seems easiest was sent in by reader Doug Elder. He found this stainless steel tumbler that a single ice ball mold sits in. 

He says: 

•  The hole in the mold must be pointed down at an angle. With the hole straight down, you end up with a clear ice "egg" instead.
•  I fill the cups to the brim and gently wedge the molds into the cup with a finger over the hole until the hole is under the water. Do this over the sink and the overflow runs down the drain. I keep as much water in the cup as possible, so there is water visible around the edge of the mold. 
• There is no problem getting the mold out of the cup. I usually give it 24 hours to freeze and there will be an inch or two usable puck of clear ice under the mold. I'll run a little tap water on the outside of the cup and around the inside edge to loosen up the belt of ice holding the mold in the cup. This doesn't crack the balls. 
•  At 12 or 13 hours the sphere is only 80% frozen, but probably more clear than at the 24 hour point. 

 Update: In this post, I attempted and was successful at replicating this method. It works great!

Update: Mike Laine (see in comments below) found a smaller insulated mug to use: the Funtainer. This takes up less space in the freezer than the full-sized mug. He also poked a hole in the bottom of the ice ball mold for easier filling. See his post here.

Plastic Mug with a Stand

Reader James Carroll found another way that works. He found a plastic coffee mug. The ice ball mold sits on a smaller container inside the mug. 

He found the plastic, 16-ounce mug at Walmart, but it is also here on the manufacturers website. The smaller container is a small Rubbermaid container that fits inside it. 

Instructions: 

• Put container in mug.  Fill mug and container with water up to the brim of mug.
• Fill silicone sphere mold completely with water. Put your index finger on the fill hole of the mold, turn upside down, and plunge into the mug.  Do this in the sink since the water in the mug will overflow.
• So now you have the filled sphere mold sitting upside down on the filled container, inside the filled mug. If you freeze it like this, you will wind up with a clear egg.  Because the freezing water around the sides of the mold will squeeze the mold out of shape.
• To get an ice sphere, use a straw to suck out the water in the mug until the water level in the mug is just below the rim of the container.
• Takes about 20-24 hours to fully freeze.  You also get a cloudy big ice cube from the container.

Thank you so much Alcademics readers James Carroll and Doug Elder for being more diligent in solving the clear ice ball problem than I was! 

An index of all the ice experiments including best successes and many failures is here. 

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Another Way to Make Clear Ice at Home

This is a list of specialty cocktail ice providers – companies that make large, clear ice such as 2-inch cubes, spheres, and spears. Many of them also make sculpture ice but this list is not for that. 

I haven't put them in any order, so you'll have to look through the list to find ones in your area. 

Outside USA

Image: Chisel-It

• Ice Rescue, Wellington, New Zealand
• Mammoth Ice – Sydney, Australia (Ships to Australia) 
• On the Rocks Ice – Vancouver, Canada
• Eskimo Ice – London, England
• Ice Cubed, Manchester, England
• Crystal Group – Paris, France
• h-eis - Dresden, Germany
• IsCompaniet – Stockholm, Sweden
• Park Island Ice Department – Stockholm, Sweden
• Les Marchands – Quebec, Canada
• Ice Up – Greece 
• The Iceman– Toronto
• Minus 9, Bangkok 
• The Nice Company, Paris
• Navy Strength Ice Co for Melbourne
• Bare Bones Ice Co for Sydney
• Ice Studio, London

USA

• Custom Craft Ice Sculpting – Arizona
• Chisel-it Ice – Concord, CA
• IceBulb – Los Angeles, CA
• Penny Pound Ice – Los Angeles, CA
• Cold Star Ice – Santa Ana, CA
• Blind Tiger Ice – San Francisco Bay Area, CA
• JustIce – Chicago, IL
• Brookline Ice Co. – Boston, MA
• Cocktail Kingdom Logistics – NYC
• Hundredweight – NYC
• Ice Occasions – Las Vegas, NV
• PDX Ice – Portland, OR
• Cape Cod Ice – East Providence, RI
• The Cold Standard – Dallas, TX (no website)
• Glace Luxury Ice – Ships to the US 
• Standard Ice – Greenville, NC
• Mixology Ice – Miami, FL and New York, NY 
• The Ice Doctor – Gainesville, FL
• Fat Ice – Austin, TX
• Minnesota Pure & Clear Ice – Minneapolis, MN
• Les Marchands, Montreal, Canada
• The Clear Ice Company, San Jose, CA
• Crook Factory, Savannah, GA 
• US Ice Corp, Michigan 
• Kentuckystraightice.com 
• West Coast Ice – Los Angeles, CA
• Bar Alliance, Nashville TN
• Michigan Clear Ice
• Favourite Ice Co – Mid-Atlantic Region
• King Cube Ice in Atlanta Georgia
• Mr Ice Guy – Miami, Florida 
• Artisan Ice, Phoenix, AZ 
• Creative Ice, Seattle, WA
• Doro Ice Company, Jacksonville, FL
• Melt, New Orleans, LA
• Okamoto, NYC
• Colorado Ice Works, Denver, CO
• Beaker & Flask Beverage Company Milwaukee/Madison, WI
• Ice Cubed, Denver, CO
• Hailstone Ice, Brooklyn, NY
• Manhattan Ice, NY
• IceBox, Charleston and Greenville, NC
• Vault Ice, Oklahoma City, OK
• Ice Cubed, Honolulu, HI
• Brilliant Ice Co. in Salt Lake City, Utah brillianticeco.com
• Deep Water Ice, San Francisco, CA
• Abstract Ice, SF Bay Area

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

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Freezer Harvest: A History of Ice Cubes

In my previous experiments with making colored ice balls, I found that the color from food coloring in water didn't evenly distribute, even though it made pretty patterns. 

But when I visited the new MKT Bar at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, I had a drink with an ice ball with well-distributed color. It was made of cranberry juice.

Surprised, I froze some of my own ice balls by filling the molds with juice – I tried grape juice, cranberry juice, and Vitamin Water. 

All had nice and even color distribution. So this is a good trick for adding additional flavor to cocktails that slowly infuses into the drink over time. 

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

Related articles

Perfectly Clear Ice Balls – A Clever Trick

A Look at MKT Bar at the Four Seasons in San Francisco

Paloma Recipe Round-Up: 20+ Paloma Variations

One of Alcademics' readers figured out a simple way to make perfectly clear ice balls by using a silicon ice ball mold, a piece of wire, and a pot of water. 

His name is Craig Belon and so he calls it the Belon Method. No actual parrots are required.

[update: Check out easier ways to make clear ice balls at the Index of Ice Experiments]

Artwork by Craig Belon, as are all photos in this post except the next one.

The method is this:

1. Get yourself a silicone ice ball tray like this one that comes in a pack of six. 

2. Over a pot of water (or better yet, a cooler as that will produce lots of clear ice) make a wire loop that the ice ball mold will sit on. 

3. Fill the pot with water just up to the wire. Also fill ice ball with water. Feel free to fill the ice ball with distilled or filtered water for better taste.

Dunk the filled ice ball mold into the pot of water  with the hole FACING DOWN. As you pull the mold up out of the water to set it on the wire. The water should stay inside the ice mold rather than running down into the pot. That's the whole trick.  

4. Freeze it.

As I figured out during all the ice experiments, the water freezes directionally from the coldest place to the warmest; and the first parts to freeze are perfectly clear whereas the last area to freeze is cloudy from trapped air, impurities, and pressure cracks.

In a typical ice cube, that's outside-in, with the cloudy part in the center.  In the Cooler Method I force that to be top-down. Using this pot the water will freeze from the outside-in, but the big pot creates a big heat sink so the top will be clear until after the ice ball is fully frozen.

So with the hole in the ice ball mold facing the bottom of the pot, as the water in the mold turns to ice and expands, it pushes out the extra air-filled water out the hole into the pot below. 

5. Let it freeze, then remove it. 

Now that's a sexy ice ball! Thanks for sharing Craig! 

For those of you who want to freeze more than one ball at a time, I'm guessing you could simply make multiple loops in the wire to hold multiple ice balls, but suspend it over a cooler (as in the Cooler Method) instead, as that is all freezing from the top-down. And at the end, you'd have a bunch of ice balls plus a slab of clear ice with which to make cubes. 

Belon also included a way he likes to drink absinthe using an ice ball. 

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