A Cocktail's Most Important Ingredient

When making a cocktail, many people only think about the alcohol, the mixer, and possibly the garnish, but what about the base of most drinks? Most cocktails use ice in one form or another at some point. It can be built, shaken, stirred, or blended, but ice plays an integral part in a lot of cocktails. Why all this talk about some frozen water? Because a lot of people don't understand what ice does for a drink. Let's go over the basic forms of ice and then I'll talk about what ice does for a drink and why this is so important.

Ice comes in pretty much four basic forms:

• Cubed: When most people think of cubed ice they think of the large chunks of ice they make in trays in their home freezer. While these are cubes, other shapes include crescent, cubelet, top-hat (the ice cubes literally look like a top-hat), or the small cubed ice you come across in bars and restaurants that usually measures somewhere around 1"x1"x1/2".
  
  
• Cracked: Cracked ice is made by taking larger cubed ice (about the size you have in your home freezer) and breaking it into smaller chunks. A lot of times this is done by placing the ice in a towel and giving each cube a good whack with a mallet.
  
  
• Crushed: Also called flake ice. While you could just continue hitting your ice with a mallet like you would to make cracked ice, this won't produce consistent pieces and you'll probably wear holes in your towels pretty quickly. To get good crushed ice you need an ice crushing machine. This machine breaks the ice into tiny pieces that are pretty uniform in size which is important. Ice crushers can be either manual or machine driven. If you have a lot of orders calling for crushed ice, invest in a good, machine operated ice crusher. Your bartenders will thank you and your customers will get their drinks faster.
  
  
• Shaved: Shaved ice is pretty much ice that has been blended into the consistency of snow. If you can, use the smallest ice you have available to put in the blender to avoid as much wear and tear on your blender as you can (crushed ice is a good starting point).

This will cover 99% of drinks out there that call for ice.

Now that you know about the different types of ice, let talk about what ice does for a drink and why it is so important. The most obvious thing ice does for a drink is it cools it down. What may not be so obvious is that by lowering the temperature of the alcohol, it reduces the alcohol flavor, the "bite" you notice when drinking alcohol neat (this is why people will put alcohol in the freezer). This allows for the other flavors to come through in the cocktail. Of course not over-pouring helps but I'll get into that at a later time.

The other thing ice does for a cocktail is add a very important ingredient, water. Yes, water! Water dilutes the drink slightly (this is a good thing) which also mellows the alcohol. When new drinks are invented, the unspoken ingredient is this water. Without this added touch of water, the drink won't taste right. And in delicately balanced drinks, it could ruin them. You can test this out yourself. Take two glasses and fill one of them with ice. Now add 1 1/2 oz. of vodka and 3 oz. of orange juice to both. Put a straw in each and taste them. The one without the ice tastes stronger because you don't have that touch of water.

Now that you know what ice does for a drink, another thing to take into account when planning your bar is what type of ice do you need? Most bars will need cubes at a minimum but if you are planning on doing only blended drinks then getting an ice machine that makes crushed ice would be a better choice while a high-end club may have many ice machines churning out different types of ice for different types of drinks. I read about one club in the Chicago, IL area that featured eight, count them, eight different types of ice. Why would a place need that many types of ice? Well, it's because different shapes and types of ice do different things for drinks.

• Temperature: The colder the ice is, the more it will cool a drink but the lower the amount of water (dilution) it will add. Also, some people like to chew their ice and the lower the temperature of the ice, the harder it will be.
  
  

• Displacement: The amount of area taken up by ice will effect how much liquid will fit into each size of glass. If you have an 4 oz. rocks glass and the ice takes up 2 1/2 oz., you would have to fill the glass to the rim for a 1 1/2 oz. shot of liquor which isn't good as you want some room at the top for ice melting and "walking room."
  
  
• Surface Area: Without bringing back any painful memories from high school science class, different shapes of ice expose more area of the ice to the liquid. The more surface area, the quicker the ice melts which means it cools the drink quicker but also the more it dilutes it.

Now you know more than you ever thought possible about the importance ice and its effects on a cocktail. A lot of bar owners never think about this important ingredient and it shows more than they realize. Don't make the same mistakes. Think about your clientèle, about the types of drinks you plan to serve, and choose your type(s) of ice with the same care you want your bartenders to have as they make each and every drink. Your customers will notice.

Icecube picture by Editor at Large (Own work) CC-BY-SA-2.5, via Wikimedia Commons