ICEOLOGY 101 - THE HUNT FOR CLEAR COCKTAIL ICE

Berserkers, Foodies and Cocktailers,

As those of you who have been reading the Cocktail Thread in the Beer and Spirits forum know, I became obsessed with cocktails this summer. Part of that obsession has been trying to figure out just how exactly to replicate the rather cool-looking crystal clear ice I get in high-end restaurants in my drinks and water all the time. After much research and experimentation, I finally figured it out. There are a number of approaches to doing this, each with varying levels of cost, effort and complexity. I’m going to take you through all of them one at a time after a quick summary if you just want to get to how to do it.

QUICK SUMMARY:

  • Bad water + bad freezing method = bad ice that is cloudy, brittle and tastes bad.


  • Good water + directional freezing = clear ice that is solid, melts slower and tastes good.


  • You can use an icemaking machine, directional ice molds, a chest freezer with regular ice molds, or a cooler chest full of water to get clear ice.

You can use your chest freezer to get mostly clear ice if you follow these steps:

  • Get some distilled, bottled, or filtered water. Taste it to make sure you like it. If you wouldn’t drink it, don’t use it for your ice.


  • Boil the water first and let it cool down to warm. Boiling helps dissipate some gases and impurities out of the water and into the air. The warm temperature will inhibit the freezing process and slow it down, preventing too many small crystals from forming in your ice too quickly and helping keep it clear as it eventually does freeze.


  • Place your silicone ice molds at the very top of your chest freezer, stacked flat on top of the other food items. Place them in a single layer only, do not place any molds on top of others.


  • Wait 24 – 48 hours, checking on your ice every once in a while just in case it’s done sooner.


  • When the ice is ready, quickly pop it out of the silicone molds and into a freezer safe bag or container and store it away.


  • The resulting ice will be mostly clear but you will notice streaking within the ice as well as a few cloudy patches in some cubes due to some unevenness in the freezing.


  • Do not be confused by frost on the outside of your ice. That’s gaseous air turning into a solid when it touches the ice. The frost disappears once the clear ice is immersed in liquid.

HOW ICE WORKS

I don’t claim to be a chemist (although it was favorite and highest-scoring science in school all the way up to University when I chose to forgo science for law), so I’ll just give you a nuts and bolts basics so you can understand what’s going on. Water turning into ice is what’s known as a state of change. It’s a reversible state where the matter changes from one form to another, the three possible forms in nature being solid, liquid and gaseous. In this case, liquid water turning to solid ice. In order to achieve the state of change from water to ice, you have to remove the energy in the water molecules which is done via cold. Remove enough energy and the liquid water stops moving around and turns into ice. Conversely, add enough energy and the molecules can’t stop moving around and eventually disperse into the surrounding air as the water evaporates and turns into a gas. Remove that energy again and it eventually becomes a liquid again.

Since states of change are reversible, ice will eventually melt back into liquid on its own when the cold is removed. If you drop the ice in another liquid, like a cocktail, the energy of the surrounding liquid is absorbed by the solid ice which has the concurrent effects of chilling the surrounding liquid, speeding up the natural state of change of the ice back into water, and diluting the cocktail with the additional liquid mass that is released.

WHY DOES MY ICE LOOK AND TASTE HORRIBLE?

Two reasons: 1. Your water sucks. 2. The device you are using to freeze your water into ice sucks. This double suckage gives you really bad ice. See, the freezer compartments of our home fridges and freezers really accelerate the state of change from liquid to ice. In doing so, they also trap any molecular impurities already dissolved in the water as it freezes, especially minerals and gases. Normally you can’t see these in the water but you sure can once it’s frozen solid. Or to be precise, you think you can. What’s actually happening is the impurities trapped in the ice are bending the light around them which to our human eyes appear as a white cloudiness trapped in the ice. The more impure your water is and the faster it freezes, the cloudier and worse looking the ice gets and tastes.

Additionally, the trapped impurities affect the structure of the ice causing it to be brittle, break up and dissolve quickly due to both lack of structure and less actual water being present in the ice. This causes a rapid domino of effects: your cocktail is diluted too quickly so it loses flavor and tastes weaker as you drink. The impurities get released into the cocktail, so it tastes even worse. The ice dissipates quickly so the chilling effect also dissipates quickly. You then need to add more ice to keep the drink chilled, but this only exacerbates all the previous bad effects.

WHY DO I WANT CLEAR ICE?

There’s a few good reasons why you want clear ice:

  • It looks cool in your cocktails and spirits because you can actually see what you’re drinking.


  • Since there’s less impurities in it, it tastes better.


  • The ice melts slower due to a stronger structure, isn’t brittle and doesn’t break up and dissolve as quickly keeping the drink chilled longer and less diluted as you drink.

WHEN DON’T I WANT CLEAR ICE?

Simply put, when you don’t intend to drink it! You don’t need clear ice to pack into a cooler to keep food and drinks cold. You don’t need to apply clear ice to take down swelling around an injury. You don’t need clear ice to chill down a bowl of creme anglaise as you whip it up into a custard. There’s just no point in going through all the time and effort to make clear ice that you have no intention of drinking. Period.

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OKAY, YOU CONVINCED ME. HOW DO I MAKE CLEAR ICE?

Making clear ice involves two distinct steps, one for the taste and another for the proper structure of the ice:

  1. FOR TASTE: Use good water.


  2. FOR STRUCTURE: Use directional freezing.

PICK YOUR WATER CAREFULLY

Water is the most important of the two steps. The clearest ice in the world is useless if it tastes like the lead-lined pipes delivering your tap water. In the cocktail thread I mention that I always use bottled spring water if I can. If not, I at least boil the tap water to try and eliminate a great deal of the impurities.

Since that post, I have given up completely on using tap water at all because due to the horrible taste of it which I have now become sensitive enough to detect. If you’re not convinced of the importance of this step, try this experiment as I did: make a single ice cube using your plain tap water and another one using better water. Use filtered or bottled, whichever you prefer. Then suck on each ice cube in your mouth. See which one tastes better. Once you realize that tap water does have a bad taste to it, you’ll never go back to it icemaking again. Come back, I’ll wait.

All done? OK, now that you realize how important the water is, what type of water should you use? Simple answer is any clean water that actually tastes good. To be more specific, you can use distilled water, spring water or filtered water. My own personal preference is bottled distilled water but honestly even water from a water filter pitcher will do. It’s entirely up to you just as long as it’s not unfiltered tap water. And always taste the water first just to make sure. Now on to the directional freezing which is how you actually get your clear ice.

HOW DOES DIRECTIONAL FREEZING WORK TO MAKE CLEAR ICE?

Ever notice how the top of a frozen lake is clear? Or how you can see perfectly clearly through an icicle? Or how the ice hanging on plants and trees after a winter ice storm is so clear you can see the frozen tree branches through the ice? All of these ice phenomenon are due to the same principle: directional freezing. The energy is being removed in a focused direction causing the ice to form slowly in small crystals and allowing the dissolved gases and impurities to leave the water.

While the principle is identical in these cases, they differ in where the impurities and dissolved gases go. They have to go somewhere as the ice forms. In the case of a lake, the directional freezing is downward as the top layer of water freezes they go further deeper into the lake water. They can’t actually escape the water due to the top layer of ice so they just recede into the remaining water, invisible to the human eye. If the whole lake were to entirely freeze, though, at the bottom you’d see a solid cloudy layer of impurities and gases.

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In the icicle and ice storm cases, things work slightly differently. The directional freezing is outward, so impurities and gases actually have somewhere to go and they dissipate into the surrounding atmosphere. The water forms a thin layer of ice as it freezes and then another layer of ice is frozen on top after that and it continues until you have large quantities of clear ice. Further, the water involved is actually in constant movement as are the agitated impurities within which speeds up their release into the atmosphere.

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So that’s all great except you probably don’t want to cut unhygienic ice out of frozen lake, hunt for some random icicles in the summer or wish for an ice storm that could damage your home and property in the winter. So how do you directionally freeze water into ice at home? Glad you asked. You can try one of the following methods.

THE EASIEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE WAY: BUY A CLEAR ICEMAKING MACHINE

Icemaking machines are a great option. They make large quantities of clear ice and they usually have built in water filters so you don’t need to worry about the water quality. Everything is automated so it requires absolutely no effort on your part other than supplying the water. The type of icemaking machine you want mimics the icicle/ice storm method of directionally freezing by moving water constantly around a freezing cube mold. A thin clear ice layer forms on the mold and then another and another until the molds are filled with solid clear ice.

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Of course, icemaking machines are also large, expensive, and make far more ice than you can possibly use at one time if only making ice for home. Even a countertop machine will be expensive and make huge quantities of ice, probably more than you need at a single time. If this option doesn’t appeal to you for these reasons, you’re going to have to use your regular freezer to do the job.

if you do go this route, though, please stay far, far away from the type of machine that makes “bullet” ice. These work by dipping small rods into a pool of stationary water and building layers of ice until ice bullets are formed. The problem is that since the water is stationary, the impurities and gases remain in the water and freeze into the bullets. The result is brittle cloudy ice no better than the kind automatic refrigerator icemakers give.

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THE HARDEST WAY WITH JUST YOUR KITCHEN FREEZER: THE CHEST COOLER METHOD

The absolute hardest way and one which I would never personally dream of trying is to fill an insulated chest cooler with water, close it and throw it in your freezer. The lake style of directional freezing will occur with the water nearest the surface freezing and then slowly moving downwards. This will result in a huge single block of ice which will be crystal clear for a great portion of it while the bottomr portion will be cloudy and streaky as all the impurities have been trapped in the bottom.

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This is by far the hardest and most labor intensive way of creating clear ice. First of all, the chest freezer is going to take up an enormous amount of space in the freezer. Then, you will actually have to let the cooler defrost a little so you can actually slide the ice block out. So now you’re actually dealing with large slippery wet ice. Then, you have to carefully separate the clear ice portion from the cloudy ice portion. Then you have to cut up the wet slippery clear ice into smaller pieces as quickly as you can so you can throw them into freezer before they completely melt away. And you have to do all of this using sharp dangerous kitchen tools that could accidentally slip off of the wet ice and possibly injure you. Not to mention that you’ll have a large wet mess to clean up aftewards. All this said, people do it all the time and you can find online videos of it. They will either encourage you to try or cause you to completely give up on the idea.

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THE EASIEST WAY WITH JUST YOUR KITCHEN FREEZER: DIRECTIONAL ICE MOLDS

The easiest way that doesn’t involve a dedicated machine requires using a directional ice mold. These have become en vogue lately and work on the same principle as the freezing lake. They freeze the water into ice from the top surface downwards to give you a layer of clear ice cubes. Simple and easy to use and reasonably affordable.

Like the lake, however, the impurities and gases can only go in one direction once the top layer of ice forms: downwards. This requires the ice molds to be placed into an insulated custom reservoir of some type that also holds water so they have somewhere to go. It also requires the actual ice molds to have perforations in the bottom of each cube holder so that they can leave the top layer of frozen ice. Which means the ice molds are useless outside of the reservoir because of course water leaks out of them since they have holes on the bottom.More importantly, the need for an additional reservoir means that the directional ice mold requires a lot of space in your freezer. This could be an issue depending on how full your freezer is. Especially if you have more than one mold you want to use.

One advantage directional ice molds do have, however, is the ability to make perfectly clear ice spheres. Spheres melt slower than cubed or shaped ice because there’s less surface area and they just look cooler in a glass. Popular directional ice molds you can find on the Internet are the Dexas Ice-ology, ClearlyFrozen, Tovolo, TrueCube, Rabbit, and WinterSmiths ice molds just to name a few. You can easily find many for sale on the Internet.

Clear Ice sphere mold.jpg
THE SECOND EASIEST AND LEAST EXPENSIVE WAY: THE CHEST FREEZER METHOD

This is the method I use and I pretty much stumbled upon it by accident. My fridge freezer was too full one day recently and I had no room for my ice trays so I put them in my chest freezer which was also quite full but for a few inches of headway space at the top. I checked the next day and saw that the water had not frozen through and was about to move them to the fridge freezer when I noticed that some ice had formed in the trays in a thin layer on top but was crystal clear. I decided to let them finish freezing all the way through. 48 hours later, I had some fairly clear ice. I decided to then boil some water and repeat. This time I had mostly clear ice except for streaking and a few cloudy patches. I’d just found a way to make clear ice without any fancy equipment or machines without even trying.

Here’s why this works. A standard fridge/freezer’s cooling element is at the back of the entire fridge/freezer and a fan blows the cool air all around the horizontal freezer cavity which is insulated on all sides to keep the freezing cold in and heat out. Essentially, it works the same way a convection oven does only in reverse with cold instead of heat. This causes freezing to occur all around the items in the freezer quickly but eliminates any possibility of directional freezing. This is actually great for preserving your food and stabilizing ice cream but terrible for icemaking. That’s because the rapid environmental freezing causes small ice crystals to form quickly which in turn trap impurities a lot quicker and any that do manage to excape the ice are circulated right back into it. On top of all this, the stale air inside the cavity is being constantly circulated and forced into the water as well, adding even more impurities into it.

Chest freezers, on the other hand, have a vertical shape and design. Ever notice that the items at the very bottom freeze faster and are more solid much sooner than the items at the top? That’s because of directional freezing. Unlike a lake, however, the freezing occurs from the bottom and moves upwards. The cold starts at the bottom and sides and the energy rises upwards. This energy insulates the items closer as it moves to the top so it takes longer for them to freeze, but eventually the energy does dissipate and all the items eventually freeze. So if it works from the bottom up, how is it possible to get directional freezing in a chest freezer?

Well one way would be to put ice trays on the bottom of your chest freezer without anything else in them. The ice would freeze from the bottom up and the energy and impurities would escape into the large freezer cavity and dissipate eventually. Of course, this would be a tremendous waste of time, electricity and freezer space.

The other way is to do what I do: place the ice trays at the very absolute top of the chest freezer on top of all the other food. Then something interesting happens. From best as I can figure out, the cold travels upwards and hits the ice cube trays from the bottom but they are insulated both by the large amounts of frozen food underneath it and the rising energy I mentioned. As a result, the ice starts to freeze slowly on the surface and goes downward. Hence, a top down lake freezing effect resulting in… mostly clear ice.

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This method is not 100% foolproof. As you see in my pictures, the compromise in making clear ice this way is that a minute amount of impurities will still be trapped within the ice and try to escape as it solidifies causing streaking all throughout the clear ice. Not a lot, but some. Further, you may still see some cloudiness in some ice cubes because of uneveness in your chest freezer’s functioning. But overall, this is not a bad method at all. There is a compromise here in visual quality, though, and your own personal taste will dictate whether you can live with it or not. If you’re bothered by the streaky appearance or small pockets of cloudy ice, then you should probably look into an automatic machine or directional ice molds. If that’s not a concern for you as it isn’t for me, then this is the ideal way to go. I also find the streaking trapped within to actually be kind of cool looking as well as it looks like a clear snowflake trapped within the ice but that’s just me.

You’ll also notice that not all of the ice freezes at the same time. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The longer the ice takes to freeze, the clearer it will be because the formed crystals will be a lot larger and have less chance of trapping impurities between them. Do expect this method to take at least 24 to 48 hours and maybe even longer. Don’t worry, though, by week’s end you’re sure to have large Ziploc freezer bags full of clear ice. If this isn’t enough for you nor fast enough, then you should probably look into getting an icemaking machine.

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There’s another serious advantage to the chest freezer method: the low cost. Assuming you already have a chest freezer filled with food, this is the least expensive method of all. The only investments are the cost of good clean water (water filter pitcher, home filtering system, bottled water, etc.) and ice cube molds. That’s it. I got fancy with the superhero ice molds – there’s the Superman logo symbol, Batman logo symbol and Spider-Man mask in the freezer with the Wonder Woman logo symbol, X-Men logo symbol and Avengers logo symbol molds I ordered from Amazon on the way as I write this – but I also use a couple of standard 2 inch regular cube molds. I personally strongly suggest using silicon molds as it’s easier to get the ice out of them.

Speaking of which, when you unmold the ice, you may notice that it looks white all around. Look carefully. This is not impurities trapped within the nice. This is frost forming on the outside. Gaseous air is turning into a solid when it touches the ice. The frost disappears once the clear ice is immersed in liquid. Note how in my second pic below you can just barely even see the Superman and Batman logo ice cubes in the water. The regular two inch cube is more visible but that’s because it’s a much larger shape and the streaking is much more prominent. But in all three cases, not a hint of actual white cloudiness as they all but disappear into the water.

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With the frost and the liquid removed, you can now see the clear ice much more clearly, pun intended. Note how you can now actually see a bit of streakiness in the Superman logo cube as well as the regular square cube. The Batman logo cube, however, is 100% clear.

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And that’s your Wine Berserkers primer on getting clear ice for your drinks and cocktails. Have fun with it and feel free to let me know how your ice turns out.

Just saying

I just use a wintersmith haha

I just use this. Works great, very easy,

George

What are the dimensions?

I was ready to order one right up until I saw the price. I don’t make cocktails often enough for that to be worth it. I’ll try Tran’s methods.

the mold makes 6 - 2" square ice cubes or 12- 1/2" square cubes. You can only freeze one old at a time in the cooler

The cooler measures approx - 10"W X 6.5"deep X 6" tall

George

Sold, thanks

Same here. $90 for an ice mold. I need some real life pics from George to consider further.

Interesting device. From what I see, this is one of the few whose ice molds actually DON’T have holes in the bottom of each cube holder. That being the case, it means that it is replicating the same process of my full chest freezer with the ice trays at the top. Kudos to them for figuring it out.

I’m also intrigued by the icemadeclear device as it appears that it would be much easier to extract the cubes than with the insulated molds I have now. Wondering why I can’t find any other real-world reviews though.

It works perfectly. Crystal clear ice with tap water. The big cubes do take a while …12+ hrs to freeze. 90% of the time I make those. It only makes 6 at at time so this is by no means mass production.

I have no skin in this game. Just some friendly advice.

George

Thanks. I may reconsider given your thumbs up.
For now I may just be using my cheap mold and buying ice from Standby in Detroit (if you’re ever back in the D, try their cocktails!) when I want the real thing
https://www.standbydetroit.com/cocktails-togo/xqphjj77xei7d91a90rlntmg99x3q7

Good video for clear ice gadgets

I usually order from Penny Pound Ice in LA and they deliver. They have lots of different shapes and sizes and quality is great. I like the look of Ice Made Clear though. Will check that out.

Gotta put on those safety glasses! :slight_smile:

George

This is business based here in Oklahoma that sells clear ice cubes at local bottle shops. They also ship.

https://vaultice.com/

I had forgotten but there is a whole thread on the subject on the cocktail board:

I also got the Ice Made Clear kit back when it was in the crowdfunding stage so ended up paying around $70. It does take up a bit of space in a freezer shelf but it makes beautiful clear cubes. You even end up with a giant hunk of ice in the reservoir that you can then chip away and store in a ziplock.