Alcademics.com

A Clear Ice Ball Maker You Can Buy

One difficulty with the Igloo Cooler method of making clear ice is that you get a great big block of ice at the end and have to cut it up into usable cubes yourself. I developed an ice cube tray using plastic boxes that gets the ice into long rectangles, and that's a bit closer to ideal. 

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But if the desired result is round clear ice balls, we need to either produce a mold that fits inside the cooler, or else carve out ice balls afterwards.  

Well, it turns out that someone produced such a mold to make clear ice balls one at a time, using the same principles as the Igloo cooler method. 

Alcademics reader Todd pointed me to this ebay listing for a clear ice ball maker from Japan.

 

 

As you can see, it's an insulted tube that holds a circular ice ball mold inside of it, along with extra space below the ice ball.

The important thing to note is that the ball mold is perforated. This allows any air and impurities in the water to get pushed out of it, towards the bottom of the mold, as it freezes. In other posts here on Alcademics, we've discussed that's how you'd need to build the mold in order for it to work. 

 

 

It only makes one at a time, but it's pretty cool. The only not cool thing about is is the price: It's for sale at $97.60 each! 

I still kinda want one. 

 

 

Modern Day Pond and Lake Ice Harvests in America

I got it into my head that I want to see a pond or lake ice harvest, despite my contempt for winter. 

Commercial ice harvests changed the cocktail landscape in America in the early-mid 1800s, allowing for the creation of juleps and cobblers and the popularization of the drinking straw and the cocktail shaker. 

Today there is still ice harvesting on many American lakes and ponds. As far as I can tell it's more historic reenactment more than practical, with most of the places that have an ice harvest limited to a single day of the year. 

Most places bring out the old tools - the long saws and the hooks - and allow people to cut up pre-scored sections of ice. Then they float it to the collection point on the lake, grab it with a hook, and slide it on a series of ramps (or sometimes pull it with a horse or tractor) into an ice house, where the blocks of ice are stacked with layers of sawdust in between.

I was looking for one that I might visit and came up with several places, so I thought I'd share them with you in case you live nearby. 

Modern Ice Harvests

- Tobyhanna ice harvest - Near the Steamtown National Historic Site near Scranton, Pennsylvania. They run a train to the ice harvest. A write-up on the harvest is here.

- Howell Living History Farm - in Lambertville, New Jersey. I believe the ice harvest date is January 28th. In addition to harvesting, you can make ice cream with the ice. Information from last year is here.

- Curran Homestead - Located near Bangor, Maine. The next Ice harvest is on February 11, 2012. 

- Cape Pond Ice - This is not an ice harvesting location, but a modern manufactured ice house in Gloucester, Massachusetts. They offer tours. 

- Thompson Ice House -  Located in South Bristol, Maine, which looks pretty far out there. The ice harvest is in February but the date hasn't been announced yet.

- Hanford Mills Museum -  Not far from Cooperstown or Oneonta, New York. The 2012 ice harvest is on February 4, 2012. Besides the ice harvest there are vintage cooking demonstrations and lots of food for sale.

- Brookfield Ice Harvest - In Brookfield, Vermont, a ways from Burlington. Not sure of the website or the exact date, but last year it was January 29. Call 802-276-3959 for information. Some details here. "Activities include ice cutting and ice boom demonstrations, an ice-hauling contest, a chance to try hand-made snowshoes and view ice sculpting."

 - Longfellow's Wayside Inn - In Sudbury, Massachusetts. Nothing on the calendar yet, but last year they did ice harvesting.

 - Old Sturbridge Village - In central Massachussetts. Had ice harvest demos in the past, I don't see any on the calendar for 2012. 

 - Ice Alaska - This is more of an ice carving celebration/competition near Fairbanks. The park is open February 28 - March 25, 2012. They harvest ice from an on-site pond with a more modern tool that looks like a saw on legs. I don't know if the ice harvest is demonstrated for the public or not. 

- I haven't seen any case where it's a public event, but some Amish people harvest ice. There are some good write-ups online. 

Please let me know in the comments if you find any others. 

How Machine Ice Is Made

These are a few ways that ice was and is made, which I learned from the awesome book Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance by Mariana Gosnell.

Slushie Method

The first way is just like making ice cream the old-fashioned way: snow or cold water mixed with salt can become colder than freezing. So if you put a cup full of water (or ice cream ingredients) and stir the supercooled salt/water mixture around it, the water in the cup can turn to ice.

Expansion of Gases

As vapor and expands into a large space the molecules speed up, and to do so they take heat from the surrounding environment. This is similar to how evaporation of sweat cools you off - the liquid turns to gas and expands into the air.

Early ice machines taking advantage of this property used pistons that compressed air then released the pressure. The air expansion would pull heat from its surroundings - in this case a container of salt water - and that salt water would turn a pan of water into ice. 

The next generation of ice machines used other gases instead of plain air- ether and ammonia for example. They still do. 

Vintage Block Making

The Ice book also described an ice block-making operation from the Millersburg Ice Company in Ohio. They use large metal pans filled with city water that are lowered into a lake of salt water cooled to 12 degrees Fahrenheit. The pans of water then freeze from the outside-in. 

Into the center of each pan they put an air hose to keep the water moving. As ice likes to be a pure crystal, the ice forming first is crystal clear, leaving most of the minerals in the water trapped in the liquid center portion. Before the block of ice fully freezes, they suck out the mineraly water and replace it with more city water. They say it looks less cloudy this way, though the center core is still a bit cloudy. 

Making Ice Cubes - Bag Ice Method

Some commercial ice machines make ice in the following way: Water runs across vertically-positioned, cooled plates. Ice forms on the surface. When it reaches the desired thickness, they poke it with knobs that break it up into cubes. This ice is bagged and sold. 

Making Ice Cubes - Clear Method

Other ice machines make clear cubes in the following way: Regular water is sprayed upwards onto cooled plates. The plates are cooled only to 32 degrees Fahrenheit - freezing temperature. At this temperature water freezes but minerals generally do not, thus the minerals drain off while the ice that freezes is nice and clear. 

Making Flaked Ice

Flaked ice is the kind you see at fish markets- smaller than cubes but less dense than crushed ice. This is made in a machine that sprays water onto a cooled, rotating drum. After just a thin layer of ice forms, the ice falls off the drum and shatters.  

How Water Freezes

This post is about how a lake freezes, but it should be more or less the same for how an insulated container freezes in a freezer. The information is from the excellent book, Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance by Mariana Gosnell. 

Turnover

As temperatures lower, the water in a lake "turns over." The top layer of water is heated by the sun during the day and is therefore warmer and lighter than the layers below it. At night without the sun, the cool air above the lake cools the top layer of water, which makes it denser than the layers beneath it. The top layer of water sinks. The new top layer gets colder until it too sinks. This is repeated until the top part of the water column reaches the same cool temperature. 

This temperature is not the freezing temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but 39 degrees. That's the temperature at which water is at its densest and heaviest. This also means that water contracts at this temperature and takes up the least space. 

Latent Heat of Fusion

After the lake has reached 39 degrees throughout the top part of the water column, as the cold air above it sinks to a lower temperature than the water, the water cools off to below 39 degrees. Now, however, the water getting colder makes it lighter than the 39 degree water below it, so the water no longer turns over. It stays on top and continues to cool until freezing. 

For water at 32 degrees to convert to ice at 32 degrees, a lot of energy must be given up. Normally it takes 1 calorie of energy to change the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius, but when water is changing phases to ice, it must give up nearly nearly 80 calories of energy to change phase without changing temperature at all.

Sometimes as the water is giving up the 'latent heat' to change phases, little wisps of fog are visible above the water's surface.  

Nucleation

In most cases, ice crystals form at a nucleation point: a bit of something around which an ice crystal builds. This is often an impurity in the water, and in a lake can be dirt, snow, or even rain. 

The ice crystals that form initially can be in weird shapes across the surface of the water rather than an even grid pattern.  

Lakes tend to freeze from the outside-in, as nucleation points are on the shore and the water isn't as deep there. I assume that ice cube trays would also freeze from the outside-in as the nucleation point would be spots along the side of the tray. 

Clear Ice

Clear ice on a lake is an indication that it froze slowly. As ice crystals form, the crystal lattice is is tight and there isn't room for impurities to fit inside it. (Ironic since impurities are usually needed to start the crystallization process.) Thus slow-freezing ice rejects impurities including air, minerals, and salts, and pushes them out of the way. 

This is why the last part of the ice to freeze is where any trapped air and impurities are. Most ice cubes are cloudy in the middle because the water is freezing on all four sides of the container; outside-in. On a lake or by using an insulated cooler in the freezer at home, the only coldness is coming from the top.

In a lake the water doesn't freeze all the way to the bottom so lake ice is very clear - the impurities and air are beneath it still in the liquid. In a cooler in the freezer, the cloudy part of the ice is only on the bottom - the last place that freezes. 

 More Freezing

After the ice crystals have formed on the surface, they eventually start growing down, thickening the ice. But as the ice thickens, the water beneath it turns into ice at a slower pace. This is because ice is a poor conductor of heat, so the thicker the ice, the further the distance the latent heat of freezing has to get to the cold air above the pond. In other words, the rate of freezing slows the thicker the ice.

 Saltwater

When sea ice freezes, most of the impurities - the salt- is pushed out of the freezing ice towards the bottom of the ocean. But about one-fifth of of the salt stays in pockets between crystals, in little capillaries. 

Camper's Cocktails in Every Day with Rachael Ray

I have a two-page spread in the November 2011 issue of Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine. 

It has a few trends - stuff like fresh ginger and sherry/port in place of vermouth along with some ice cube tricks (recognize that rainbow ice?).

Also it has four recipes I developed- a spirit-interchangeble mint buck, a Grapefruit Vesper, a Sparkling Cinnamon Punch, and a port/espresso dessert drink. Nothing ground-breaking but they're all pretty tasty. 

Run screaming to your local newsstand and pick it up!

Ice Experimentation in Australia

I recently received an email from Gordon Ryan of the forthcoming bar ReviveR in Gosford, Australia, who has been experimenting with some of the ice concepts posted here on Alcademics. He agreed to let me share his trials with y'all. 

He says: 

I’m going to be opening a new bar about an hour north of sydney in a few months time and one of my key things is to get ice that compliments the drinks we’ll be serving. I recently went to Tales and saw both the ice sessions, so picked up some great tips there, but your post on using the cooler to make the ice inspired me to see what I could come up with, so I thought I would share my efforts. Please excuse the roughness of the build as it was something that I threw together as a proof of concept.

His first experiment is with a homemade and extra-large version of the Polar Ice Tray that I wrote about here. (It might be best to check that post out if you're not familiar with it.) Gordon writes:

I started by buying a largish plastic crate and then a bunch of 2.5 Litre tubs (2.5 Quart?).  I also bought some expanding foam filler, set two of the smaller tubs into the foam and then waited for it all to dry.

I then took one of the tubs and drilled a series of holes in the bottom. (This is to imitate the Polar Ice Tray.)

(He then placed the perforated tray into a solid tray and placed that into the insulated cooler. The next picture is the result.)

In this method, the cloudy part forms at the bottom of the insulated container, and ther perforated bucket should make it easy to separate the clear part (inside the inner bucket) from the cloudy part (outside the inner bucket but still inside the outer bucket).

He says, "And so this was the result.  Not perfect, but still pretty good I think."  Agreed!

For the next experiment, he created an insulated ice cube tray, sort of a version of the Igloo cooler method that fits ice cube trays. In his words:

I also grabbed some of the Styrofoam boxes today and made a new tray specifically for the Tovolos.

I started with a box that was used to ship broccoli, then cut it down so I had sheets of foam.  I then traced out the trays, then cut out the holes.  Once that was done, I used spray adhesive and glued it to one of the uncut sheets.

Then he added the ice cube trays back in as pictured above, and froze them. And here is a nice cube they produced. 

He says "I think the key is to take the ice out of the freezer while there is still water in the base as you can see you can get some great results at the top of the cubes and then it gets cloudy at the bottom."

Agreed. It's the same with large ice in the Igloo cooler. The cooler method (controlled-direction method, pond method, whatever we're calling it) does not reduce the amount of trapped air or impurities in ice. It only controls where in ice they form - in the last part to freeze. 

Thanks for sharing Gordon!

Bartending Techniques Seen at World Class 2011

In what should be my final post about the Diageo World Class Global Finals, I wanted to mention a few cool tricks I saw from bartenders that might be fun to experiment with. 

(A bubbling dry ice drink from Heinz Kaiser)

Henning Neufeld of Switzerland used vodka and ice, instead of water and ice, to cool his cocktail glasses. He said this was because vodka freezes at a lower temperature than water, you could get the glasses colder.

Other bartenders used dry ice for this same purpose, but there was a lot of dry ice around. 

Heinz Kaiser of Austria stirred one of his drinks with dry ice. Dry ice, as we know, is made of carbon dioxide and sublimates from the solid state to the gas state without turning liquid in between. In doing so, this cools the cocktail without dilution, but Heinz made the additional point that the releasing CO2 gas also carbonates the cocktail.

Manabu Ohtake did his bottle service pour through flaming cyprus wood chips. He did this not just to flavor it, but because both the flaming and the aeration from pouring softens the spirit.

Torsten Spuhn of Germany, seeking to recreate the flavors of brands of bitters that wouldn't be available at the contest (Indian customs forbid the importing of any alcohol and those brands weren't available), figured out how to use Angostura bitters as a base and flavor them with other ingredients on-site to approximate what he used back home. 

Good stuff.  

Tales of the Cocktail Seminar: How to Build a Cutting-Edge Ice Program

Here are notes from the first seminar I've attended at Tales of the Cocktail.

How to Build a Cutting Edge Ice Program

• Christy Pope - Cuff & Buttons, worked at Milk & Honey
• Chad Solomon - Same as above, but also Pegu Club
• Richie Boccato - Opened an ice company out of Dutch Kills
• Joseph Schwartz - opened little branch

Notes

• Glacial ice: because of the pressure from accumulating snow, the ice is compact and squeezes out all the air in it. - 
• Water and Bismuth are only atoms that expand when they freeze. 

Good Ice vs. Bad Ice

• Good ice: Big rock, holds its shape, slower melt rate, preserves drink at optimum balance (doesn't turn to slush in the glass), better aeration (because shaking longer because ice is bigger), bigger window of error between over- and under-shaking; both strong and petite bartenders can make the same quality drink. 
• Though Harry Craddock said never to shake twice with the same ice, or serve with the same ice you shook with, but maybe with big ice you can. 
• At Milk & Honey - started freezing, barbacks cutting them, putting ice into glasses and putting back into freezer. 
• Milk & Honey - started with hotel pans - for 40 seats had 3 chest freezers plus one for cut ice. 
• Little Branch has upright freezers (for the footprint), mak Collins spear - Tovolo ice cube tray, cutting out separators to get four spears from each. This saved time cutting up ice, wasted ice and effort. Takes 2 hours to prepare the ice for the shift each day, including all ice work and setting the bar. This serves 500-600 cocktails on a busy night. 
• Also they have different cut ice for shaking but now use the Tovolo "King Cube" trays. They use this ice for shaking and for a single old-fashioned. 
• To set up they pull molds out of freezers along with pans of ice (just switched to delivered slabs of ice instead of freezing them) - these slabs of ice are cut up and used for double old-fashioned glasses - plus fill them up after cutting for next day.
• Upright freezers, slab delivery, King Cube molds helped increase capacity and speed of ice program at Little Branch.
• Scotsman ice machine - pellet ice - better than crushed ice. 
• At Pegu Club - Kold Draft ice machine, double-stacked. Seating for 100 plus standing. At another bar, added chest freezer to a similar program for high-volume. 
• Water for an ice program. Water source and quality varies greatly between cities. Southern Cali - reverse osmosis with ion exchange filter for ice program. Everything else (for ice machines) used a water softener system. 
• Richie of Dutch Kills: Queens water is "disgusting." So bought block ice. Both cut in advance of shift start and during slow times in bartenders' shift. 
• To make clear ice: hot water and filtered help a little, but the solution is buying it made from a Clinebell machine. Okomoto Studio in NYC - provide the nice ice for Dutch Kills.  
• Clinebells - Need to put it in a good spot, but can get a block every 2.5 to 3 days. Freezes from bottom up from a cold plate. A pump rotates the water. The tank never fully freezes fully. You scrape off the top where the impurities are. 
• Weatherup - has one Clinebell machine in Tribecca that is the entire ice program. Make shaking, stirring, glass ice. 
• This one is cost-effective. If you have a half-way confident HVAC tech it's quite easy to maintain. Clinebell $6000 brand new, but you can buy refurbished and get an 8 year warranty. $2800 or so for refurbished. You can also get a hoist from Clinebell or buy one from an auto-parts store. Buy one there. 
• The hoisting process is th emost physically dangerous to humans. 
• Chainsaw is only $50 or so, other tools are common carpentry hammers and chisels. "You don't need fancy tools; you can buy it at the hardware store."
• Zane Harris now uses a vertical bans saw that has a teetering platform. 
• Hundred weight - another place Richie has that has 2 Clinebell machines. Climate-controlled room (cold). They make, cut, and store the ice all in an insulated room. 

• Ice handling - don't set a block down on a room-temperature table; the block will crack. "Ambient temperature is very important." 
• Don't shake with ice fresh out of the freezer - will crack and thus make the point of large ice moot. 
• Keep big ice on top of crushed ice in a metal pan at the bar.
• Aviary in Chicago uses blast freezers. $5000 - $15000 cost.
• It's pointless to have an ice program like this unless you have glass frosters for every piece of glassware! - Christie
• Breaking down a block: Consider the glassware for size, and use that to determine what kind of cuts to make. Start with your largest cubes, becuase if you break them you can use it for other purposes. 
• Don't let ice sit in Tovolo trays too long with ice in it or it picks up silicone flavors. 
• Keep your Kold Draft tuned, or you get bad ice. 
• It might be more cost-efficient to rent a Kold Draft machine that comes with maintenence rather than to buy it. 

• Richie says you can use an iron to smooth cubes. Google Okomoto Studios - look up video on Martha Stewart, shows ironing of ice.