How the coolest bars get their nice ice, baby
Achieving frosty perfection for your cocktails
Cameron Bogue is gazing proudly at his brand new Scotsman ice machine as it churns out tiny nuggets of ice destined for mojitos, mai tais and whisky Smashes. He is, he admits, just a little bit obsessed with ice.
“It’s a bit nerdy,” says Bogue, who is director of beverage development at Vancouver’s Earls Restaurants. “But ice is fun.”
Ice, after all, is the unsung player in cocktails, and its performance can elevate the ordinary to the sublime.
Its main role is to chill drinks and add dilution. In fact, as much as a quarter of a cocktail’s volume is water added through shaking and stirring with ice.
But not all ice is created equal. The shape and size of the cube, the type of water that is used and the temperature at which it is frozen all make a difference in how ice works in a drink.
A perfect cube of ice is crystal clear, reasonably large and feels hard, heavy, dry and very cold. But most commercial ice (known as “pillow ice”) is small, lightweight and cloudy with a slick, even watery, surface. It melts quickly, shatters when shaken and makes drinks murky and watery.
And so the perfect ice has become an obsession with many bartenders, both professional and amateur, who will go to extreme lengths to obtain it.
At Barchef in Toronto, for instance, bar manager Frankie Solarik carves ice to order from a large block sitting on the counter, just as barmen did back in the 19th century.
In St. John’s, N.L., bartenders head to the beach to gather “bergie bits,” chunks of ice that break off the icebergs that drift by each spring. Iceberg ice is some of the cleanest, densest ice on the planet.
In Japan, bartenders store ice at different temperatures (–5 C and –20 C) based on what it will be used for, and hand-carve ice spheres as if they were diamonds.
Some perfectionist home bartenders are crafting crystalline cubes from distilled water and silicone trays, while professional bartenders install high-end KoldDraft ice machines, which produce large, clear, slow-melting cubes (www.kolddraft.com).
And now, for drinks that require crushed or cobbled ice, there’s the Scotsman (www.scotsman-ice.com).
The U.S.-made machine installed at Earls’s newly renovated Vancouver flagship location is the first in Canada, and is just part of a huge cocktail program overhaul for the chain.
“We’re going to make some bartenders jealous with this ice,” Bogue says.
What sets the Scotsman apart, he explains, is that it makes perfectly symmetrical little ice nuggets that provide even dilution. In contrast, traditional crushed ice is a mix of chunks, shards, chips and slush that dilutes quickly and unevenly. Unfortunately, it’s still the only real option for home bartenders. (Note that the easiest way to make crushed ice at home is to place it in a lint-free canvas bag and smash it with a mallet.)
The nuggets are ideal for drinks that are sweet and viscous, such as juleps and tiki drinks. “A mai tai served neat wouldn’t be a very good cocktail,” Bogue says. “It benefits from having crushed ice.”
On the other hand, spirits-forward cocktails like the Manhattan, old fashioned and sazerac benefit from being served with a single large, slow-melting cube or sphere with a limited surface area.