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.
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