The Polar Ice Tray is quite possibly the most essential bar accessory a home cocktail bar enthusiast should own. Really. It’s that cool.

The more you grow to love cocktails, and especially making your own cocktails, Ice Obsession Syndrome seems less and less like a mental disorder and more like a reasonable state of mind. The size, temperature, and water quality of your ice all affect the cocktails you make and serve. Further, once you start paying attention to the application of your ice, you naturally start to pay attention to the aesthetics of your ice.
The connoisseur has two desires for his or her ice, especially the ice served in a rocks drink like an Old Fashioned, Big and Clear. Big isn’t so hard, especially these days. But ice tray ice and even some ice maker ice is full of tiny bubbles that cloud the stuff and make it look dirty. And the bigger the chunk of ice floating in a drink, the more obvious that cloudiness is. The Holy Grail of cocktail ice is big chunks that look like melty glass.

Over at Alcademics, Camper English has spent the last year in the quest for clear ice. After a host of mostly failed experiments, he came up with a cool working method of producing clear ice at home. It involves putting a whole igloo cooler in your freezer, however, so it doesn’t really fit under the heading of “Convenient”.

Enter the Polar Ice Tray from Lumiaire. This sleek, small loaf of bread-sized ice tray will make you a slab of nearly crystal clear ice about 6 by 5 by 1.5 inches in around twelve hours, using the same principals that Camper worked out. As you can see from my picture up top, and this one here, it is a lovely little device, too.

I cannot recommend enough how well this little guy works. Once you get the hang of it, it produces a nice supply of serving ice to have fun with and enjoy, without taking up an inordinate amount of your freezer’s limited space.

The one criticism I have of the Polar Ice Tray is the documentation, which less than adequately explains the use of the device. So I’ll give you The Missing Manual here, if you will. This part of the review is fairly in depth, so if you want to skip it for now, just jump down to the results.
Here’s an exploded diagram of each part of the Polar Ice Tray.

Only the three bottom pieces will matter most of the time. The bottom is an insulated holder. Always make sure it is dry inside and out when you get ready to make ice. The two white trays are where the ice will form. Fill the bottom tray with water almost to the top and then nestle the top tray (which has a number of small holes on the bottom) down into it. Press down and it will fit snugly. Then add more water until the level in the top tray comes about a half to a quarter inch from the top. Lift the white trays and nestle them tightly in the bottom cooler.

Place the combined pieces into your freezer. Make sure it is resting flat. The manual spends a lot of time on the temperature you should set your freezer to for optimum results. (0° C is best.) Unless you are in the terminal phases of Ice Geekery, you are unlikely to go changing the temp you like your freezer to be for this gadget, so be assured it will produce nice results at any functional level. The worst that can happen is tiny needles of air along the bottom.

What is important is where in the freezer you place the tray. Do not put it near the freezer element! If you do, you will get a giant, knobbly, frosty, permanent wave climbing out of one side of the tray. It looks weird and makes getting the ice out harder.

The closer to the chilling element you place the Polar Ice Tray, the larger this unsightly wave will get.

One more thing that is never mentioned in the manual: do not use the lid when making ice! If you do, you will not make ice at all.

A word here on how the science of the Polar Ice Tray works. When water freezes, it pushes out any dissolved air into the remaining unfrozen water. In most ice trays, the ice freezes all around the outside first. As the crystallization moves inward, the air is forced inward as well. Soon the air over-saturates the remaining water and begins to form bubbles, which freeze in place. The result is cloudy ice. In the Polar Ice Tray, the insulated container prevents the ice from forming on the sides and bottom. Instead the ice slab forms smoothly from the top down, like pond ice. The air is forced downward instead of inward.
This is where the double-boiler like construction comes in. Bubbles will not really start to form until the ice has frozen down to the bottom of the top tray. The air is forced down through the holes and forms lots of bubbles in the thin lower chamber, but few if any will be present in the big slab formed in the top tray!

When your twelve hours is up, remove the Polar Ice Tray from your freezer and lift out the white inserts. Set them aside on a counter where they can safely drip a bit and walk away for about five minutes. It’s not hard to find something to do in your bar while you wait. Clean up the bitters stains or something. The wait lets the trays come apart easily and will let the ice warm up a bit. Almost none will actually melt however. Carefully remove the lower tray. The upper tray will be filled with clear ice, and there will be a slab of gnarly white ice stuck to the bottom.

Getting this waste ice off the bottom is easy, but does require a little patience.

Run a thin stream of cold water from the tap and let it flow over the seam between the junk ice and the bottom of the upper tray. Rotate it around until a seam opens. When the seam is deep enough to reach the first holes, turn the tray upside down and gently press on the junk ice. In a few moments, the inner good ice should slip free. Discard the crap ice and you are left with a lovely slab of clear ice.

Did I say lovely? Actually, the bottom will likely have a layer of bubbles and imperfections about a millimeter deep, and the top will be fairly frosty. Don’t worry, as soon as you use the ice, this will all disappear.

All this cloudiness will vanish as soon as the ice gets immersed.

I told you to let the ice warm up a bit because if you don’t, the thermal shock of even cold tap water will shatter the slab. It doesn’t fall apart, it just has big fissures everywhere. You can still use the ice, but it won’t look as cool. And in that case, what the heck was the point?

Before you reload the Polar Ice Tray, fill the insulated bottom with warm water and let it rest of a bit. If you don’t, the cold container will let the water in the bottom chamber freeze early, and the air will end up making its last stand in the upper tray, forming bubbles there and ruining the slab.

The blue tray and its inner lid are a special mold which makes a little ice man statue. I haven’t tried it, but if you want a chunk of ice shaped like a little dude, it should be awesome. The top lid combines with the insulated bottom to make a lovely ice bucket, should you wish.

As for using the ice, you’ll probably want to knock the slab down to four or six chunks, each of which should do awesomely for a low or high ball, depending on the shape you make. My aforementioned ice guy, Camper, has a nice post on using an ice pick, and notes that the alternative ice saw is a lot of effort.
He looks like he’s using an Anvil Ice Pick, or similar Sharon Stone approved model. Single prong ice picks like this look awesome and scary, and give you tremendous control while carving ice.

Pictured: NOT Camper English.

But at fifty bucks, the Anvil is a trifle cher…. Since the only carving I’m doing right now is simply snapping the slab in straight lines, I prefer one of these. $3.25 on Amazon.

If you store your ice in the freezer before serving, be sure to let it warm up again first, or it will shock when you put it in the drink. And as to that frost of surface bubbles that may have been evident as I mentioned above? Once you put your chunk into the drink and give it a good stir (or better, pre-chill the drink in a mixing tin and pour it over the ice) the surface imperfections will disappear, and you will be left with a glorious, clear, giant chunk of diamond keeping the finished libation chilled.

Oh and the cool little ice dude whose mold I mentioned before? Apparently, he is an action hero…

Here are a few more links about U-Cube Creative, the Taiwanese firm which created the Polar Ice Tray. Founder Chu Yulong is apparently quite the cocktail lounge connoisseur. The company’s Taiwanese website (in english) shows some other products they make, including a number of other shaped Polar Ice Trays. The site is worth looking at for some creative ideas they have for using the product. I’m looking in to whether or not the other ice trays are available on this side of the Pacific. I’ve talked to someone at Lumiere, and he tells me that the Bamboo version of the Polar Ice Tray will be available in the US around the end of March!

Here’s a nifty little product to aid in easier Tiki enjoyment: Lekue’s C’Rush ice tray. A lot of these new modern silicone ice trays, including most of Lekue’s, are cute but hardly functional. However this item looks different to me in that it fills a real need.

Tiki drinks, and other cocktails of the swizzle variety, need lots of crushed ice. For the home mixer, this is an inconvenient thing to produce on demand. I use my BlendTec blender for crushed ice usually. But it’s honestly an over-powerful solution for the task, and I always end up with a lot of snow mixed in with my hailstones. The classic solution if the Lewis Bag and a wooden mallet, which can be fun from what I see. I’ve avoided this because I don’t like banging on the counters and making my glassware and bottles clink and clang. And if you happen to have a colicky baby (I still have flashbacks), getting out this bag is likely to make your wife take away the mallet and use it on you!

The C’Rush is a very shallow ice tray with many, many narrow slots. When you remove it from the freezer, you roll it up and squeeze, and all those slender ribbons of ice shatter. When you dump it, you end up with loads of nicely crumbled chunks of ice. These trays are nicely functional in a few other ways as well. Since they are so shallow, the ice freezes very quickly. (The company claims about one hour). Also, the thin form lets you stack a lot of them in very little shelf space. Here’s a nice, watchably short video that shows how the C’Rush works:

Ordinarily, I’d have grabbed a couple of these to test myself before posting on them, but the C’Rush is still not distributed in the United States. A company called Langton Info Services in England will ship them to the States, but they cost $25.50 for two, and take about two weeks to get here. Tiki Month’ll be over by them, and I won’t need them again until Derby Day in all likelihood. If any of my European readers (I know there are a bunch of you, I check Sitemeter) have tried out this ice tray, I’d love to hear how it works so I can decide to pop for one now or wait for stateside distribution.

(Via Craziest Gadgets)

(Source: Ice Ice Baby. Well worth reading.)

Giuseppe Gonzalez is, as mentioned here before, one skilled bartender. More, this man behind New York’s Tiki destination, Painkiller is a deep thinker upon matters mixological. Just last month, he wrote a genuinely exhaustive discussion about one of the major processes they went through setting up Painkiller: Determining the amount and form of ice to use in their drinks.

I’d planned on writing about his post a little later in the month, but the comment thread to my Kallaloo post encouraged me to advance the schedule. This is a bigger deal than it might seem, especially during this month, when Mr. Blendtec tends to be front and center.

Giuseppe’s article is well worth reading in its entirety, possibly more than once. It contains a wealth of information about bar management, recipe tasting, and general Tiki-tude. It also has some great reminders that Everything You Think You Know May Not Be True. But the real meat of the article is how ice changes your drink. And how many ways ice changes your drink. And he gives some good theoretical and experimental backing for what he concludes. I want you to read it yourself, and I couldn’t do better than he has anyway, so I’ll merely try to give you some things to focus on when you think about implementing what he talks about, whether you follow the link or not. (Expert Tip: Follow the damn link!)

First, whether you are making a Martini or an Hawaiian Bongo Wahini, ice has a second equally important function beside making your drink cold.
It dilutes it.
Water doesn’t just make your drink weaker, though too much of it can do that. Water changes, and usually enhances, the flavors of a cocktail. Determining the right amount of water content in a drink is often a big challenge on its own, but Gonzalez addresses the added complication that comes from (as is common with smooth blended drinks) much of that water content still being frozen. This month, I’m going to spend a lot more time considering the amount of ice I use in blended drinks to improve my results. And I’ll try to give some more clear directions in recipes I give.

Second, the strength of your ingredients affects your drink’s balance. This is especially important with dealing with classic recipes, or substituting liquors. Something I took away from this that I’ll apply immediately here at home is the need to modify my pours when I make my Mai Tais with Smith & Cross. I love the flavor profile S&C gives, but I knew I was facing some problem somewhere. It’s pretty significantly over-proof, so I think I’ll try simply cutting back a bit on the amount.

Lastly, we all have different ideas of perfect balance. Know your own. Adjust your ratios to reflect your own preferences in any recipe as you get more experienced. But you also need to know your ice. Is it colder or warmer than what you expect the recipe envisioned? How’s it’s surface area? Are you swizzling pre-crushed ice from your Lewis Bag? Flash blending? Smoothieizing? Shaking or stirring? Or even just putting it on the rocks? Whatever the case, know the effect of your ice on the dilution, because here is Gonzalez’s number one conclusion:

1. Balance appears to be (more) a universal quality than we had previously expected.
… when you take dilution into account and style of ice being used, the trend from sweeter to drier becomes pretty self-explanatory. Adding sweetener to a cocktail that is higher dilution, becomes vital to achieving balance.

Finally, I’ll point you, without further comment, to the bit well down in the article in which he discusses how the way they serve Zombies at Painkiller has evolved. It’s both fun and highly instructive.

It’s Official: Camper English has too damn much fun with ice.

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 News: The Wall Street Journal Notices That Home Bars Are "In"
• Basement Bar Design, Things to Consider #1: The Bargain
• Basement Bar Design: A Tour of the Parade of Homes
• Basement Bar Design: Star Trek Doors
• 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
• New Blog Function
• SideBlog: A Really Clever, Easy IKEA Home Bar
• SideBlog: Basement Bars Are Helm's Deep For Men
• SideBlog: Blender Drink Aficionados Booking For Europe With Spare Luggage Space
• SideBlog: Making Tiki Stuff: Royal Tiki
• SideBlog: New York Post Notices February is a Good Time For Tiki Month
• The Bar Accessory The EVERY Cocktail Geek Must Obtain
• The Sixth Day of Christmas
• Tiki Timeout: Bar Building and BlogBarCrawl Update
• Trader Tiki's Basement Bar in the News
• Unique Tiki Mugs
• 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!