Category: ice

Another section cut from my Vinepair article on lake ice from Norway (yesterday I shared the section on different types of ice blocks) is this one below. In it I explain why lake ice went out of fashion. It wasn’t only that ice making machines got better….

 

 

Rise of the Machines

 

In her book Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks–a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, author Amy Brady describes the downfall of the natural ice industry. Now that ice had become a daily necessity in America toward the end of the 1800s, ice companies harvested blocks from local rivers adjacent to cites; not just from far-afield crystalline lakes. The water was often polluted with agricultural and industrial waste, and in some years the bacteria-laden ice caused outbreaks of disease. (Even more problematically, these same source rivers were used for the drinking water.)

 

 

Bartenders noticed. The Standard Manual of Soda and Other Beverages, published in 1897, noted, “Some dealers put shaved ice into the soda water when served. It is a tedious process to grind the ice on a shaver, and makes the process of serving drinks much slower; ice is usually impure, and the beverage is really not fit to drink; and lastly, the beverage quickly loses its gas and tastes flat.”

 

 

Dirty soda wasn’t the only issue impacting the old-school ice business. The period of natural global cooling known as the Little Ice Age was ending- 1850 is usually cited as the end of the era. Many lakes previously harvested for ice didn’t freeze as deep as they used to; in some years not at all.

 

Machine-made ice also became less expensive into the early 1900s, especially after manufacturers switched to using ammonia as a coolant. Brady writes, “Withing a few years of [World War I in 1918] ending, the electric refrigerator went from being a novelty of the rich to one of the country’s most common household appliances.”

 

 

Machine ice had become the new standard, so some extant companies clinging to solvency tried to rebrand their old-fashioned lake ice handmade by Mother Nature as a craft luxury good. It didn’t catch on at the time, but maybe one of these days…

 

 

Read the original article on Vinepair here.

 

 

In the story I wrote for Vinepair about harvesting lake ice in Norway, a couple sections got cut out. They weren’t essential to the story, but I liked them a lot! 

 

 

This first section is about ice blocks – I was researching the blocks people use at different ice hotels and ice carving festivals to see if they were machine or nature-made. The results are fascinating: 

 

Other Lakes, Other Places

 

Not all ice blocks are equal. The Minnesota Ice Festival this year features the world’s largest ice maze, with all the 3,452, 425-pound blocks for it produced by a fast (and semi-clear) brine-cooled block-making machine owned by Minnesota Ice.

 

 

Orderud of DesignIce in Norway says that the blocks for a lot of other ice mazes and ice hotels (the non-see-through parts anyway) are typically made from compressed snow, rather than ice. Clear Clinebell blocks are sometimes used for the windows.

 

The Songhua River is the source for “most” of the thousands upon thousands of ice blocks used for the huge annual Ice and Snow Festival in Harbin, China, not too far from the northern border with Russia. Reportedly there are more than 2000 sculptures and constructions in the theme park built from ice or snow, and some of the ice structures reach over 150 feet in height.

 

 

And at the World Ice Art Championships, held annually in Fairbanks, Alaska, blocks are taken from gravel ponds and standardized to 6 by 4 by about 2.5 feet (depending on how thick the ice is that year). Leigh Anne Hutchison, member of the Ice Alaska Board of Directors, says of the pond blocks, “Some even are cool enough to have methane bubbles in them.”

 

 

That sounds a bit more “scary” than “cool,” until you realize that nobody is trying to eat that ice. (The blocks with methane bubbles do look pretty groovy though; she sent me pictures.) As far as Orderud is aware, none of the naturally frozen ice for these or any other festivals is served in drinks.

 

Read the story on Vinepair here, and imagine this section in it. 

Most of us ice nerds know about making a clear ice sphere shell as pioneered by The Aviary, but you can use the same easy technique to make other shapes. 

 

 

The technique to make the ice shell for a drink inside a sphere can be found in The Ice Book – and you can also find it in this story in Imbibe Magazine.

 

Inspired by a video of a Midwestern lady who used the same technique to make covers for ice lanterns in 5-gallon pails, I made some other shapes. 

Notes and Tips for making Ice Shell Containers

• Fill a plastic container with water and leave the top off. Freeze for a few hours until you can see a shell forming around the insides.
• The top layer will be thicker than the bottom and sides, so keep that in mind. 
• After the first few hours I dipped the container in warm water to loosen it and slid out the shell. I put it back in the freezer outside of the container so that the bottom would freeze faster. 
• After the layer is thick enough, poke a hole and let the interior water drain. 
• I expanded the holes using a metal stick dipped into hot/boiling water. See below for another method. 

 

 

 

For this shot glass below, I used the copper pan bottom to melt off the top of the shape entirely. I think it looks great. The downside is that you loose a lot of the height of the shot glass this way, so this would be best in a taller container. 

 

 

If you enjoyed this post, please consider purchasing  a copy of The Ice Book to help support this blog, thanks!

 

You can make shapes that are 3D turn out clear even if they don't fit into clear ice molds. 

It's as simple as putting them on top of a clear ice system, with the hole side down facing into the tray below. 

Resources: 

The Ice Book: Cool Cubes, Clear Spheres, and Other Chill Cocktail Crafts

Football ice mold

Golf Ball ice mold

Dexas IceOlogy tray

 

I made these colored hearts in clear ice cubes. 

Resources used in this video (affiliate links):

The Ice Book: Cool Cubes, Clear Spheres, and Other Chill Cocktail Crafts
https://amzn.to/48V4qzs

Heart Stamp
https://amzn.to/3uljhEk

Clear Ice Trays:

Clearly Frozen
https://amzn.to/3OwGQkp

Dexas IceOlogy
https://amzn.to/491hByM

 

 

 

Well here's something I never expected when I started experimenting with ice all those years ago: The Weather Network did a segment on directional freezing to make ice for cocktails. 

I wish I was smart enough to have pitched them The Ice Book when it came out! 

Check out the video here.