Category: ice

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. 

A few weeks back I was talking to Charles Joly, beverage director of The Aviary in Chicago, about ice. (This happens a lot.) We were talking about the cooler method I use to make clear ice. 

The Aviary has a Clinebell machine that makes 300 pound blocks of sexy, clear ice that they then cut up into various shapes for drinks, so they don't need to use the slow-ass cooler method, BUT they also have a blast freezer.

I'd always wondered if you could make clear ice fast using the cooler method in a blast freezer, and luckily Joly was curious as well, so he gave it a try.

He said:

The cooler was a 10qt Rubbermaid with the lid off. Time was about 13 hours at a low of -40F and on average a bit warmer than that (-30-40F), as the blast freezer was opened and closed during service.

I was surprised it didn't freeze the entire block in that time. As you can see from the side view, it was about 60% frozen with side walls and a thin top layer beginning to form.

I cracked off the soft shell from the bottom, drained off the water and knocked of the thin side walls that were holding the pool of water. The remaining block had good clarity. 

I would say the clarity is relatively close- say 85% that of the clinebell. 

In conclusion, he says: 

For home use or a one-off event, this ice is great. For venue use, we would need a lot of coolers. The Clinebell provides our hand chipped ice spheres (large, one rock per glass) and our ice shards that go into every glass of water served.

I think the technique is awesome for the home bartender, if you're doing punch service or simply as an alternative, although much more labor intensive and lower yielding, than the Clinebell.

So yes, it works. And maybe if you don't need too much block ice and have a blast freezer with space in it this could actually be useful. Just not at The Aviary. 

Thanks for the effort, Charles!

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

I am honored to have as Alcademics readers people who are just as huge cocktail nerds as I am. Many take on projects that I run out of time to do, pass along better information to me, or fill me in on the science I'm missing.

Kevin Liu, who has recently started the blog Craft Cocktails at Home and also blogs at ScienceFare.org, tested a method of making clear ice that another reader left in blog comments. 

In this post, he discusses the science of clear ice and two methods to make it at home.

1. The Igloo Cooler method, pioneered here on Alcademics. (An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.)
2. The High-Temperature Freezing method, in which you let water freeze into ice at just below the freezing temperature. It's also simple, and depending on your freezer may not take up as much space.

Read the post for more info. 

As you may recall, through much experimentation I figured out a way to make clear ice at home.

I later found an ice cube tray that uses the same principle (controlling direction of freezing) to make clear ice.

And now someone just pointed me to another ice cube tray that also uses the same principle (and has the same name as the last one).  The Polar Ice Crystal Clear Ice Cube Tray is more compact than the other model, but it makes just one big cube at a time.

Like the other model, this is an insulated container with a tray inside. The interior tray is perforated, so all the cloudy parts of the ice are frozen beneath the perforation and you chop it off after it's frozen.

This one costs $18.99. More info is here.

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