It happens to everyone: You pick up an ice cube and can't remember if it belongs to you or someone else. Frustrating! If only your cubes were monogrammed there would be less confusion in the world.
Kidding! But I've seen bars around the world imprinting their clear ice cubes with logos and monograms, so I decided to test out some methods of doing so at home.
Three different easily-getable types brands are below, with pros and cons.
If you're new to Alcademics, you'll want to read up on how to make perfectly clear ice first before you start branding it.
Method One: Use a Wax Seal Stamp.
I bought this brass stamp off Amazon. Copper is the best conducting metal, and I think that's what the bars use to do branded ice in volume, but I found this brass one can easily imprint ice without being heated.
One downside is that there are only fancy versions of letters and symbols available. Oddly, there seems to be a lot more variety/simpler designs for steak brands than for wax seals stamps. The other downside is that it doesn't stamp the ice very deeply.
But still, this is my favorite of the three branding methods.
Method Two: Use a Steak Branding Iron.
I bought this one, with an A for Alcademics. There is a lot of variety in BBQ/steak brands (who knew?) so look around for one that suits your needs.
The downside to this is that the brand does need to be slightly heated. I held this over the flame on my stove for about 2 seconds, so it doesn't take much heat though. You could probably use hot water, or even a lighter!
Method Three: Use a Craft Hobby Tool/Soldering Iron/Woodburning Tool.
I bought this one, plus a set of letters that attach to it.
There are a couple of downsides to this – first, you can only do one letter at a time. Then you have to let it cool down and switch out the letter on the tip before doing the next letter.
Second, the soldering iron gets very hot, so you barely touch it to the ice and it makes a deep imprint. You lose a lot of the subtlety of the letter design.
And third, with the letters/words you have to imprint them backwards.
So this is probably the least clean way to brand your ice, but you can customize it the most with the full alphabet. Then, just for fun, I put back on the basic needle-shaped tip on the soldering iron (that comes with the original iron; no need for add-ons) and wrote some words freehand.
Because I have the maturity of a 15-year old, this is what I made:
But you know, you can make other designs and words freehand that are better suited to adults.
The full index of ice experiments is here – lots of other fun projects with ice.