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Our new Ice age

In addition to cooling your drink, melting ice adds water. Some mixologists take pains to make sure it's pure.

By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published March 7, 2007

Ice is not as simple as you think.

We fuss endlessly over our water - tap, branch, Perrier, Fiji, blue Tynant or the sleek new Voss. We memorize the most fashionable and indistinguishable vodka and the priciest call brand of whiskey. And we applaud the bartender who uses fresh juices.

But ice? Who cares, it's just frozen water.

Or is it?

Yes, ice is water in another form. But some finicky mixologists now seek ice to match the pretensions of other ingredients. The cube with gourmet buzz now is from Kold-Draft, a large perfect 1.25-inch cube. Some bars have ice-sculpted "luges," where shots make a ski-run to the patron's mouth.

Still, understanding the nature of ice will give you better drinks at home and when you're out.

What ice does

Ice serves two functions in a drink. It cools it. How? Ice cools by melting, thus adding water, which means it dilutes the drink.

Shape and size control those functions. The larger the cube, the warmer and stronger the drink and the richer the aroma. Fine for a grand old single-malt, but out of place in a daiquiri.

Indeed the julep, the grandest of all whiskey drinks, insists on crushed ice, according to Kentuckian Ernie Lubbers, who promotes Knob Creek and other small-batch, large-price whiskies.

While size is sometimes specified in drink

recipes, it has long been part of the drinkers' call, neat, rocks or just a cube.

It's also preference. Mise en Place bar manager Dave Madera likes a drink with crushed ice that keeps the flavor going longer. And as a pro he dreads odd shapes with dimples that can make for odd splashes.

That raises the Bondian controversy: shaken or stirred. Fastidious drinkers say Agent 007 was wrong. A classic gin martini should be stirred because shaking dilutes and clouds it.

That won't convince Doug Bedell, chef at drink-smart Mystic Fish in Palm Harbor. Stirrers seek a sparkling clear drink that's pretty, but he's a shaker. He's into taste, not visuals, he says. He also likes to chill his vodka first.

The water in your ice

Tightwads fear half cubes or crushed fill glasses with too much ice and too little booze.

What about the main ingredient, water? The purer the better.

Impurities, including iron and other natural minerals in the best tap water, will discolor ice and linger in the taste.

For someone like Lubbers, those off notes are disturbing and the reason for the quaint call for "bourbon and branch water," which technically is from a pure stream or brook.

To remove impurities, smart restaurants install filters. Mise en Place filters all the restaurant's water for ice, cooking and cleaning. Bedell has two filters hooked up to his ice machine. Starbucks' baristas brag that water in their ice has been through three filters.

They need to, says Tony Lopez of Tampa Ice, who sells and services ice machines. Plus filters should be cleaned regularly because hot water is cleaner than cold water. He was not surprised last year when Tampa middle school student Jasmine Roberts tested the ice and the toilet water from five fast food restaurants and found that most of the time the ice had more bacteria. (Her latest test of water at public dispensing machines also detected the presence of bacteria.)

The moral fits Lopez's motto: "A clean ice machine is a healthy ice machine."

At home you can use filtered or bottled spring or distilled water in ice trays. Today's molds of plastic and silicone now make shells, stars, ovals, pineapples and thoroughly modern "ice tubes" to drop into sport bottles of water.

For the contemporary fridge with a built-in icemaker, home supply stores sell filters to attach to the water supply line.

See-through ice

Pure water alone will not make clearer ice. Ice cube trays and almost all refrigerator icemakers make ice in the same way: still water, frozen all at once.

Commercial machines pump water continuously over the freezing surface slowly and gradually as dripping ice forms an icicle. Without the moving water, clarity is very difficult, but some commercial companies now offer ice machines, including a Kold-Draft Ice Butler, for high-end homes. Or buy fresh ice from pros at a good ice house.

Ice is food, whatever the purity, size or clarity. A big part of the safety is up to you: Store ice for drinks separately from soda bottles and beer cans, and use tongs or a pitcher when mixing drinks. Hands off.

Chris Sherman can be reached at (727) 893-8585 or e-mail csherman@sptimes.com.

[Last modified March 6, 2007, 12:08:10]