The Liquor Fairy brings me many things, not just booze. But his little wings were beating mightily this week as he flew up with a box from Air & Water, Inc. The box contained a new model portable ice making machine called the NewAir Portable Ice Maker.

The current model is more sleekly trimmed than pictured here.

Among my most important rules for a successful Basement Bar setup is the importance of a ready supply of fresh ice. Cocktails and Ice are inseparable items, like chickens and eggs. One of the more popular posts I’ve ever written was my discussion of ice making options for your home bar. Therein, I strongly encouraged people, for a variety of reasons, to consider adding an automatic, stand-alone ice machine to their setup. I got two objections from most readers to this advice: the expense of the machines and the expense or sheer impossibility of plumbing them.

The NewAir holds at least the possibility of an answer to their pleas. I’ll talk about the machine, how it works, the ice it makes, who will want this machine, and who won’t.

The unit itself is fairly large, 17 inches by 17 by 15, and weighs about 45 pounds. It is a bit large to set on a countertop, but it really is fairly portable. It has well-placed handles, large, sturdy feet, and seems pretty durable. While it is actively making ice, you can hear it but it is not obnoxiously loud.

The way it makes ice is actually pretty ingenious. I made a YouTube video so you can watch it work.

The refrigerant is pumped through pipes connected to twelve vertical cylinders. The little bucket revolves up to contain those prongs and fills with water from the machine’s internal reservoir that doubles as a drip catcher below the finished ice bucket (not seen in the video). The NewAir holds enough water to fill its ice bucket several times.
The ice forms around the prongs. There are three ice size settings, and these merely determine how thick the ice is allowed to form. When the ice has reached the desired size (about seven minutes for the smallest setting), the bucket rotates away from the prongs and the remaining water flows back into the reservoir. You can see in the video that the refrigerant goes from cold to warm, and the ice slides right off the prongs.
After a moment, the bucket rotates back into position for the next round of ice, and the attached flipper shoves the new ice over the edge to fall into the ice bucket.
The machine is not designed to be on and running full time like a built in version that costs five times as much. The ice turns into a glob of merged pieces after a day or so, rather than cleanly melting away and being replaced. This isn’t a problem if you are using the ice all the time, but if you make a drink or two a day, take advantage of the automatic timer to ensure you have fresh ice ready for you at cocktail hour. On the other hand, it is very easy to maintain, with a swift and effective self-cleaning mode.

So what is all this ice like? Each piece is a rounded, hollow cone, about an inch and a half long. It is also filled with microbubbles so it’s white rather than clear. Finally, it is pretty warm ice, coming out of the machine right at 32 degrees. As an aside, the little flanges you see in the video on the top of the ice are due to leaving the door open while videoing the mechanism. The actual ice produced is much cleaner in appearance. The ice has a large surface area to mass ratio and is warm. This means it will start melting pretty quickly in a glass or mixing tin.

In short, the ice geeks and cocktail showmen are not going to like this ice.
But then, mostly they don’t like any ice from a machine, preferring to fill a freezer with all manner of fancy ice trays and molds, or hack away like Sharon Stone on a huge block of the crystal clear stuff, so the Camper Englishes of the world really aren’t the issue here.

First off, I think the ice is just fine in the tin for shaking and stirring. I know some mixers swear by “super cold” ice, but the science (and my own experimentation) says that most all of the chilling from ice comes at the moment it melts. Using cold ice may make your drink at most a degree or two colder, but actually takes longer to get there. “Warm ice”, especially with lots of surface area, can chill a drink faster than anything else, with only a very little more dilution.
Additionally, unlike with plumbed-in ice makers like mine, you can be as big a water snob as you like with the NewAir. Use Fiji water or even Perrier I suppose. I use water from my Brita filter and the ice tastes great.
For serving in a glass, the NewAir’s ice is less ideal. It really isn’t a pretty as cubes, and its propensity to melt quickly makes for dilution issues if you are a slower drinker.

OK, who would find this machine a great buy, and who won’t?
I see two main categories of buyer who will be happy with the NewAir. The first is a lot of the people for whom I’ve been writing my Basement Bar Design series. If you are putting together a bar for your home, don’t have a massive budget and/or can’t get running water into your chosen space, the machine will get you plentiful ice for everyday use at a great price. Home bar builders who have available plumbing and sufficient budget will be much happier with a built-in system.

This guy needs a NewAir….

An even better buyer for this machine is the mobile mixer. If you like to tailgate, camp out, or own an RV, a continuous supply of fresh ice will save you from the utter barbarity of no Martinis. Of course, if you want to run the NewAir in the woods so you can sip a Pegu while fishing in that remote stream, you’ll need power. The machine takes 400 watts, and most trees don’t have electrical outlets. Ditto for stadium parking lots. If this is your desired application, be sure to purchase a power inverter so you can run it off your car. Be sure to get one that wires into your battery directly, as the NewAir draws too much power for the inverters that just plug into the cigarette lighter.

The NewAir doesn’t make perfect ice. If you enjoy being persnickity about your ice, or view it as a garnish, this machine will likely not meet your needs. If you need a lot of fresh ice for mixing cocktails, or chilling juices, sodas, or basic mixed drinks like Rum and Cokes or Screwdrivers, it will provide plenty of the cool stuff fairly conveniently and for a very reasonable price. I like the machine. It is an ingenious design, the maker has a number of previous models, so they have had the chance to refine and improve what they are doing. I haven’t had it long enough to really vouch for its durability, but as I mentioned before, both the stainless steel case and the mechanism seem pretty sturdy. If you need what a portable ice maker can give you, I can definitely recommend the NewAir. UPDATE: If you decide to get a NewAir directly from the company, you can get an extra 10% off the price by entering the discount code: “PEGU” at checkout!

The Liquor Fairy Was Here!
The following product, NewAir Portable Ice Maker, was recently provided to me as promotional consideration to encourage me to discuss it.
For a complete disclosure of my policies regarding promotional items and all other financial interests, please click this link, or follow the Liquor Fairy link in the header of this page.

If you want to follow this specific series of posts on the Pegu Blog, you can subscribe to our Basement Bar feed here. Or you can just subscribe to the entire blog, with all its brilliant content, here!
Here’s a list of the other articles in this series that have been posted so far:

• Basement Bar Accessories #10: The NewAir Portable Ice Maker
• Basement Bar Accessories #6: DIY Kegerator
• Basement Bar Accessories: Herbal Assault Part 1
• Basement Bar Design #0: Introduction
• Basement Bar Design #1: Where, What, and Why.
• Basement Bar Design #2: Refrigerators
• Basement Bar Design #3: Ice Supply
• Basement Bar Design #4(a): Essential Glassware
• Basement Bar Design #4(b): Supplemental Glassware
• Basement Bar Design #4(c): Buying Glassware
• Basement Bar Design #5: Water and Washing Up
• Basement Bar Design #6: My Own Basement Bar
• Basement Bar Design #7: Bar Top and Countertop Surfaces
• Basement Bar Design #8(a): Artists
• Basement Bar Design #8(b) More Artists
• Basement Bar Design #8: Artwork
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #1: Lit Backbar Walls
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #2: Holiday Glassware Giveaways
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #3: Beer Dispensing from Heineken and Elsewhere
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #4: Branded Beer Taps
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #5: Pure American Ingenuity
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #7: The Man Wall
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #8: The Arkeg
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #9: Global Domination
• Basement Bar Design Accessories: Hidden Lairs
• Basement Bar Design Elsewhere in the Cocktailosphere
• Basement Bar Design Elsewhere in the Cocktailosphere #2
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #1: Sheds
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #2: Dangerous Party Invitees
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #3: Irish Pub in a (really big) Box
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #4: Mr. Blendtec, activate the defenses!
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #5: 1800 Tequila's Mancave Contest
• Basement Bar Design, Things to Consider #1: The Bargain
• Basement Bar Design: A Tour of the Parade of Homes
• Bulletin, Bulletin, Bulletin!
• Christmas Idea: Martini Shaker
• I Saved at Least $10,000 Because of Cocktail Blogging...
• New Basement Bar Contest From Grant's Whisky
• The Sixth Day of Christmas
• Tiki Timeout: Bar Building and BlogBarCrawl Update
• Trader Tiki's Basement Bar in the News
• Wow, They Even Have Black Friday Sales In the Cocktail World....

Drinksology Ice Ball Maker. This technology just keeps getting closer to affordable….

My last Ice Science Roundup included a portion on the Mpemba Effect, by which certain circumstances will cause hot water to freeze faster than cold. This is incredibly controversial stuff in ice science circles, for a variety of reasons. To laymen, it seems like total bullshit, because, well, hot water is hotter and stuff. To the experts in the field who are skeptical, the objections are more scientific: Hot water is hotter and such.
OK, so the objections aren’t really so far apart.
Anyway, when last I opined on this freakishness, the problem was that while people as far back a Aristotle have noticed this phenomenon, no one had ever done any really rigorous experiments to try to see if it could be proven, and what was the cause if it could.
Apparently, the folks in Science read this blog, because one of them, David Auerbach has finally gotten around to doing some painstaking research on finding out if the effect really works. Either that, or he was out of ice, had guests coming over for a cocktail party and was desperate to get ice as fast as possible by any means possible. Which it was is left unclear by the article I read in Science News (via Maetenloch in Ace’s ONT)
Auerbach is the first to successfully set up a reproducible result demonstrating the effect. This proves the theory once and for all. Unless you are one of the numerous scientists who still refuse to believe it really works, since, well, hot water is hotter and stuff. And even Auerbach can’t explain his results, only demonstrate the effect. Unless he doesn’t, if you read what the skeptics have to say.

I’m sorry,
I’m more confused about this than I was before you started.

Me too. But it is fun to talk about, and the article is worth a read. And it gives me an excuse to post another cool picture of ice.

(Update: Welcome NotCoters! Please take a look around while you are here!)
OK, there is no single substance on Earth that more perfectly unites the cocktail geek and the science geek than ice. The deeper you get into cocktailia, the more obsessed you get with ice. Ice is both a tool and an ingredient for cocktails, so if you want to bring your A Game, you better have good ice in your kit. I would suggest to the ladies that discussing your fool-proof method for creating huge clear ice cubes at Tales of the Cocktail will attract swooning would-be boyfriends at the same rate as alluding to your Slave Leia metal bikini would at a Star Wars convention. (Guys over a certain age, that’s a good link.)
The cocktailosphere abounds with cool inks about ice, from Darcy’s classic series of posts, to Camper’s long running series on the search for clear ice, to Frederic’s recent examination of ice tools. But in a recent bout of web surfing brought about by an intense desire to procrastinate while up against a deadline, I’ve run into a bunch of cool examples of ice geekery out there in the world of science nerd-dom.
I’ll start with this video that most closely aligns with cocktailia, via Neatorama. Liquid Nitrogen is cold enough to actually freeze alcohol itself, and chef Ferran Adria whips up a batch of Caipirinha sorbet. He gets extra credit for the cool serving container, and the New York Public Library gets demerits for the crappy sound.

That Neatorama post has other cool videos about super cold things like a rocket engine that forms icicles while firing, how liquid oxygen makes charcoal lighter fluid look like a fire extinguisher, and how Antarctica has more ice than you really want.
Much more ice and super-cold geekery under the fold. (more…)

Via Mætenloch, comes this fascinating tidbit of a news story from GlobalPost: Two cases of whisky that were part of the supplies of the great antarctic explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton, have been discovered in the crawlspace beneath one of his summer cottages, located in Cape Royds, Antarctica. Strong drink was (and probably is) an important part of surviving a Summer in Antarctica. With mind-numbing wind and snow, unrelenting darkness, and giant, flesh-eating penguins lurking outside your shelter, you need booze just to get some sleep. (I may have made up that last threat.) What surprises me about this find is that there were two cases still left over!
Shackleton, incidentally, seems to have been a fairly rational dude, a trait for which polar explorers were not generally known. On the expedition which ended up leaving all this booze behind, he turned back about 100 miles from the pole, telling his wife, I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.
The article is a good read, so click the link above and enjoy. I’ll just poach two more items.
First, the last line of the piece, a quote from Richard Paterson, of Whyte & Mackay, which owns the brand of the whisky Shackleton left behind, will tell you absolutely everything you need to know about the makers of all Scotch Whisky:

“It’s been laying there lonely and neglected,” he said. “Can it not come back to Scotland where it was born?”

Second, as I write this, there are four comments on the story, which encapsulate virtually all that is silly about Internet comments. The first contains speculation that reveals that “david wayne osedach” clearly didn’t read the article. The second is from NorthernExposure, who clearly is massively more sensible than any of the experts on the scene. Chazmotic posts the third, sarcastic reply, wherein he belittles the second in multiple ways. And finally RonnieB turns the discussion pointlessly to politics, although I will grant that he manages to be mildly funny in so doing.

UPDATE: A team from New Zealand has announced an expedition this year to rescue a few bottles of the whisky, making this the world’s most expensive, long-distance booze run.

Further Update: The team has successfully extracted five cases of liquor from the ice. They believe that there are some bottles still intact, as they can hear it sloshing around inside. In a fun development, they have discovered that two of the crates are brandy, not whisky.

The weather is getting better out there folks. It is the height of Spring, and most of us are adjusting our lifestyles to being outdoors more. Perhaps you’ve just experienced your first spontaneous sweat walking from the car to the office or the stores. Regardless, the heat is coming, and with it will come thirst.
Most of us change our cocktail repertoire with the seasons, and I have a suggestion to add to your balcony or backyard evening list: The Pisco Sour.
I’ve been making these for several years now, ever since I got ahold of my first bottle of Pisco, and there simply is nothing bad to say about this drink. It tastes great and has absolutely everything a great classic cocktail should.
I’ll start with the recipe, or should I say the recipe that I use. About half of you who are already familiar with the Pisco Sour are about to stand up and exclaim, wait a minute…! Bear with me, I’m just setting up so we have a frame of reference to discuss all those things that make this a great classic cocktail, besides the fabulous, evocative name.

The result is a pale russet drink with a creamy head of foam. The flavor is sweet, tart, and complex, but seems much less potent than it actually is. It is particularly refreshing when it’s hot and the drinker is weary. That simply makes the Pisco Sour good. What makes it great is all the backstory, showmanship, and other fun there is to be had with it. Truth be told, it is a drink for cocktail snobs or pros to make and to serve. It requires ingredients not found in most home bars (or commercial ones for that matter), and you need either a little skill or just a little extra time to whip one up. And you can get a good fifteen minutes of conversation out of simply describing its background. But while the Pisco Sour is more than interesting enough to hold the affections of the sophisticated cocktailian, it is accessible enough to make the everyday wine or beer drinker who takes a dubious sip exclaim, Hey! That’s pretty good!
The base spirit, pisco, is commonly in the US casually referred to as, Peruvian Brandy. While true as far as it goes, the phrase is misleading shorthand akin to saying genever is a gin, or cachaça is a rum. The pisco I specified in my recipe is Barsol Quebranta. It is a high quality spirit that is reasonably commonly available in the US. The Quebranta in the name refers to the variety of grape used to make the brandy. I use it because it is reasonably priced, I can get it in Ohio, and it tastes good. In the interests of full disclosure, Barsol sent me a bottle of their pisco for review a while back. But that bottle is still unopened, as I am still working through a bottle I bought for myself shortly before! I thank them nonetheless, as I’m now set for most of the Summer.
An exotic ingredient is something that adds snob appeal to a cocktail. An exotic ingredient with controversial origins adds fun. I’ve written in the past of how the Mint Julep was a lot more fun when Kentucky and Maryland were constantly wrangling over who invented it and what should be in it. Peru and Chile are the same way with Pisco, except that Kentucky and Maryland were never simultaneously at loggerheads over who got title to West Virginia.
Another hallmark of many great cocktails is the ability to set the connoisseurs to arguing among themselves about its construction. The main argument surrounding the Pisco Sour has the added benefit of being both humorous and interesting in contexts way beyond the drink itself. The question is: lemon juice or lime? The peruvian recipes call for lemon, or limon perhaps. But virtually any peruvian bartender will reach out and grab the little green fruit when making a Pisco Sour. The thing is, in Peru, they call lemons limes, and vice versa. Moreover, the yellow fruits they call limes are apparently sweet enough to be directly edible! I first learned this all from Drink Boy, Robert Hess, in his video podcast from the Small Screen Network. It takes up most of the middle of his video on preparing the Pisco Sour, which you can see by clicking on the screenshot below. (I’d embed it, but I can’t figure out how to turn off autoplay. You are welcome.)

All that said, I still use lemon juice. Why? I think it tastes better. Your mileage may vary, so try both and see which makes your boat float.
Further wonkish discussion may be had on how best to construct the drink. Unlike many cocktails, the shaking performs two functions. It chills the drink, of course, but it also provides a critical mechanical process. Beating up egg whites does two things to the proteins inside. It uncurls the molecules from their natural state, which allows them to stick back together in new ways, and it introduces a lot of air into the mix, so that when the proteins start attaching back together, they form bubbles. In the video above, Robert recommends dry shaking the ingredients first to generate the thick and creamy foam, then shake with ice to chill the drink. His reason for this is that it takes a lot of agitation to generate the foam, but comparatively little to chill the drink. If he shakes the drink just until your Pisco Sour is properly chilled, you won’t get much of the creamy foam. If you shake until the foam forms, the drink will be watered down. But the dry shake, then ice shake method is time consuming, and leaves you with tired arms. If you were serving Pisco Sours in a cocktail lounge, your bartenders would need back staff just to do all the shaking, or else end up with freakishly large arms. Now, I just did a post on ice, and that research (spurred by Reese) along with Robert’s video leads me to suggest a better way. Note that the ice Robert uses is fairly small, and served up from an ice bucket. It is probably already at the melting point, and its shape has a lot of surface area. If you shake your Pisco Sour with ice like this, you will indeed have a tiny head, or a watery drink. When I make mine, I use my large cube ice from the back of my chest freezer (which I usually reserve for drinks on the rocks) These are cold and have less surface area than ice from my ice maker or from an ice bucket. Cold ice dilutes and chills the drink more slowly than warm ice (really!), giving more time for the whites to open up. Also, the presence of ice increase the impacts inside the shaker and speeds the foaming process.
Was that wonky enough for you?
The really great thing about all these options is that the Pisco Sour is relatively bullet-proof. No matter how you shake it, which juice you choose (lemons or “lemons”), or minor variations in ratio you may make, the resulting drink will be attractive, refreshing, and delicious. If you are serving people who don’t know the cocktail, you have a ready-made monologue with which to show off for educate your guests. And if they do know the Pisco Sour, then you have a ready made argument about how you are mixing it, which for many of us is even better!

Reese, over at Cocktail Hacker, has a post that I’m going to steal more of than I should, including the picture above, just because it is so cool. He does a small experiment about shaking versus stirring, and gives us the split image picture above, with a shaken Martini on the left and stirred on the right. Reese seems to start his experiment concerned mostly with the aesthetics of the result. I want you to read his post too, so I’ll leave that alone except to say that I actually find that I like my Martinis looking as if you could peer closely and see Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio clinging to a piece of flotsam amidst the ice flakes.
I’m more concerned about the bit of science Reese uncovers. His cocktail shaken for 30 seconds came out into the glass at 26 degrees. Stirred a like time, it poured at 46 degrees! When he stirred for 60 seconds, the temp managed to get down to 32. He also noticed, as you can see above, that there was a larger volume in the shaken cocktail, than in the 30 second stir. The 60 second stir almost had the volume of the shaken. Got all that? No? Too bad. I’m not going through that again. Pay attention.
The scientific principal that matters here is that the colder you want your drink, the more diluted it has to be.
Why? Two years ago, Darcy O’Neil wrote a post that pointed out the science behind this. Here is the key fact: Almost all the chill you get from ice in a drink comes from the act of melting itself. A liquid is cooled when you put ice (or even very cold water) in it because the heat energy in the warm ingredients is bled off to raise the temperature of the ice. The cool thing about water is, it takes a fairly small amount of energy to warm up ice or water. But it takes a honking big amount to change ice into water. Here’s a cool graph that shows you it takes almost 80% as much heat to melt ice (which does not raise it’s temp at all) as it does to heat it from 32 degrees to the boiling point!

Why is shaking faster than stirring? Vigorous agitation cracks and slivers the ice, which increases it’s surface area. This makes the heat transfer go faster. It also leaves air bubbles and lots and lots of little needles of ice. These little slivers will go right through the strainer, clouding the drink, along with the bubbles. And these slivers won’t melt very quickly, despite their large surface to mass ratio, because your drink is now below their melting point! Incidentally, if you don’t drink your cocktail quickly (while it is still laughing at you) these little slivers will melt, and retard the warming speed slightly.
But as the ice melts, it dilutes the drink as well. Some water is needed in most cocktails to make them taste right, but too much and you will have a bland or thin-tasting drink. This is ironic, because the colder the drink, the stronger we can take it, and in fact like it.

And here is where we move from the physics of ice to the sometimes amazing nexus of art and industrial engineering that is modern cocktail bartending.
First, the art. Do you shake or stir? How long? How hard? There aren’t really objective, scientific rules for any of this. You may have a preference so dogmatic and iron-clad that for you it is akin to the Third Law of Thermodynamics, but Pete down the bar there may have an equally strong preference the other way. Chances are, unless you are Gary Regan and want to spend a half-hour instructing an airport bartender how to make a Manhattan, your bartender will decide to shake or stir, and for how long. In this, he or she is an artist. There are many ways to arrive at a great drink with the same ingredients, and many more ways to end up with a crude paint by numbers sketch.
If the bartender is you, in your Basement Bar, you can take the time to be as loving and careful as you like, limited only by your thirst, and that of your guests. But in a crowded commercial establishment, the industrial engineering aspect comes into play. If you ask for a Plymouth Martini, stirred, how likely are you to get Reese’s 32 degree job in any bar, anywhere?
Really?
No, not even there.
A bartender who takes sixty seconds to lovingly, gently stir each Martini will be in the weeds so quickly, that his boss will need a DR Trimmer/Mower and/or a price hike to get him out.
So, if you find yourself served a cocktail that looks great, tastes great, is very cold, served quickly, and for an at least somewhat reasonable price, look hard at your bartender. He or she deserves a good reward for their skill and labor. And you need to remember them so you can come back again.

If you want to buy one for me, or more likely just buy one and hoard it for yourself, you can get it here, for a mere $174. Selfish jerk!

(H/T: Cocktailians.com)