Live the Live ™

I love my cocktails, and I feel the quality of the ice is as important as any other ingredient in my glass. After all, if the ice cubes are made from nasty water, it’s going to affect the taste of the drink.

And from a visual standpoint, a large, beautiful, clear ice cube really makes any cocktail look pretty darn impressive.

Since the tapwater at my house has chlorine and fluoride in it, I use a reverse osmosis filter to try to get as much of the bad stuff out. And I’ve been using that to make my own fancy cocktail ice cubes. But they were cloudy, so I was willing to try this new gadget.

Once I bought the Ice.Made.Clear system, and I read the instructions, I realized that, much like the ice cubes they promised, a problem became very clear: they recommend using water right from the tap– – hot tap water, in fact. Their reasoning was that the chilling process from hot to freezing, and the minerals in the tapwater, aid in the clarity process. (Also, warmer water holds fewer air bubbles, which causes the cloudiness in the ice later on.)

But I don’t want chlorine and fluoride in my ice cubes! So for me, tap water was out of the question.

As an alternative, they suggested buying spring water, claiming that using reverse osmosis filtered water would remove too many of the necessary minerals needed for the process to work. 

So I bought a gallon jug of Poland Spring to try this thing out, and it actually worked really well. But the problem was, it wasted a lot of water. Once the ice cubes are made, the container can’t be reused until you melt all the ice in it, empty it out, and start all over again. I wound up using almost an entire gallon of spring water to make six large ice cubes. That’s ridiculous. 

So, despite the fact that they recommend using tap water or spring water, I went back to my filtered water, because it’s cheap and plentiful. I heat it up a bit in a saucepan (not to the point of boiling, but warm) and then pour it into the Ice.Made.Clear system. The cubes aren’t as clear as they might be, but I know the water quality is the best it could be. And I still get pretty darn clear ice.

So here are the pros and cons of the Ice.Made.Clear system:

The Pros:
It really does make clear ice.
It’s not a big unit, so it fits in most freezers.
The whole system cost under 100 bucks, so it’s not outrageous in price.


The Cons:
It wastes a lot of water.
If you don’t have clean tapwater, buying water gets really expensive just to make a handful of ice cubes.
If you’ve got guests coming over, you better start making your cubes weeks ahead of time, because it’s a slow process.

I posted a way to make homemade clear ice cubes in a previous blog. I will repost it soon. It works really well, gives you plenty of rustic large ice cubes at once, and doesn’t cost a lot.

After all is said and done, if pretty ice cubes don’t matter to you at all, go down to your local convenience store and buy a bag of ice for two bucks, and you’re all set.