Standard cubes
The default, and right far more often than not.
- Size
- About 2.5–3 cm a side (1–1.25 in)
- In this collection
- 362 cocktails
What it does to a drink
A cube is the compromise everything else is measured against. It has enough surface area to chill a drink quickly, and enough mass that it does not vanish while you are still drinking. Cooling and dilution are the same process — ice cools a drink BY melting, and the energy to melt one gram of ice would cool that gram of water by 80°C. So you cannot get one without the other; you can only choose how fast.
Use it for
Shaking, stirring, and almost every long drink. A highball wants a full column of cubes from the base to the rim, which chills the whole drink instead of just the bottom of it.
Don’t use it for
Drinks you will nurse for half an hour — a rocks pour with small cubes is noticeably watery by the end. And anything tropical that is built on crushed ice, where cubes leave gaps the straw finds.
Making it at home
A silicone tray with 2.5 cm wells beats the flimsy plastic one that came with the freezer, mostly because you can get the cubes out without cracking them.
Worth knowing
Refill the tray immediately. The most common reason a home drink is bad is that there was not enough ice, and the reason there was not enough ice is that nobody refilled the tray last time.