Rot In Hell With Your "Artisanal Ice"

Ice. Frozen water. Now made artisanally and currently cooling drinks in the DC area.

Ambrose, a bartender at P.O.V. Lounge at downtown’s W Hotel, founded Favourite Ice last year with Range beverage director Owen Thomson. Marindin, another bartender at Range, handles most of the ice cutting.

Favourite Ice is the area’s first outfit selling customized ice, hand-cut to specification, specifically for cocktails. Its growing client list includes Range,Rasika, Jaleo, Estadio, Proof, and Hank’s Oyster Bar on the Hill.

Fresh-squeezed juices, infused liquors, and house-made sodas and bitters have already infiltrated D.C.’s drinking scene. Ice, it seems, is the final frontier for craft cocktails.

Oh shut the hell up.

One of the internet's enduring gags is the Food.com "recipe" for ice cubes and the 600+ reviews it's garnered from cheeky wags. This is the non-ironic version of that, taken to its extreme and made depressing.

It gets worse:

“Ice is the soul of a cocktail,” says Barmini “cocktail innovator” Juan Coronado. “You have your spirits, you have your ingredients—your organs, basically, in a body—that give shape and texture and aroma and flavor to the cocktail. But without ice, you have nothing.”

Ice is not the "soul" of a cocktail. Alcohol is the soul of a cocktail. Remove the alcohol from the cocktail and it's juice. Remove the ice and you still get drunk.

Apparently there's a "growing demand" for custom-made ice which, fine, if people are going to shell out money for it, hooray capitalist enterprise. But for fuck's sake can we please not be so snooty and self-serious about FROZEN WATER?

I'm not saying you should use DC tap water to cool your drinks, but come on, man. You've already convinced someone to pay $16 for a cocktail. You've won. Save the money and fill the ice tray with Poland Spring.

Looking for a defense of "artisanal ice" in cocktails? Got you covered.

Comments

[riffle]

I concur!

Don't use the ice made by these poseurs. Get a Cirrus Ice Ball Press for only $700 for the 2 inch model

http://www.amazon.com/Cirrus-Ice-Ball-Press-Premium/dp/B00A1TMFSU/

or $1,100 for the 2.75" model.

http://www.amazon.com/Cirrus-Ice-Ball-Press-Premium/dp/B00A1T7BFC

Thankfully, these are manual presses, so you can carefully hand-control how you produce your drink-cooling spheres.