Ice
Ice is an ingredient, and in most drinks it is the largest one by volume. It is also the only ingredient that keeps changing the recipe after you have finished making it.
The thing worth understanding first: cooling and dilution are the same process. Ice chills a drink by melting — it takes about eighty times more energy to melt a gram of ice than to warm that same gram of water by one degree, and all of that energy comes out of your drink. So you never get cold without water. Choosing a kind of ice is choosing how fast you want to trade one for the other.
- 362 cocktails
Standard cubes
The default, and right far more often than not.
About 2.5–3 cm a side (1–1.25 in)
What it’s for → - 23 cocktails
Crushed ice
Maximum surface area — instant cold, fast dilution, and frost on the glass.
Irregular chips, roughly 3–10 mm
What it’s for → - 18 cocktails
King cube
One big block. The least dilution per unit of cold you can get at home.
A single 5–6 cm cube or sphere (2–2.5 in)
What it’s for →
Which one, quickly
| If you are making | Use | Because |
|---|---|---|
| A long drink in a tall glass | Cubes, to the rim | Chills the whole column, not just the bottom |
| Anything you shake or stir | Cubes | Enough surface to chill fast, enough mass to survive it |
| An Old Fashioned or a Negroni | One king cube | Least water for the cold you get |
| A julep, swizzle or tiki drink | Crushed, packed | Instant cold and the frost on the outside of the glass |
| Anything served up | None in the glass | The chilling already happened in the tin |
13 of our 416 cocktails are served up, with no ice in the serving glass at all.
Clear ice, briefly
Cloudy ice is trapped air and dissolved minerals, pushed into the centre as water freezes inward from every side at once. It is not dirty and it tastes the same. If you want it clear, freeze directionally: insulate all sides of a small container except the top, so the ice forms downward and drives the cloud ahead of it into the bottom, which you then cut off. Boiling the water first helps a little. Nothing else you have read works.