Ice, ice baby 🥃

Rocks can make or break your cocktail

Cocktail photo by Nathan Aaron. Illustration by Matthew Wexler.

I recently discovered a swanky new bar in my neighborhood. The kind of place with no windows and very little insight into what you might find when you walk in the door. Where you can have a conversation, the lighting dim enough, and the music at a volume that allows Boomers, Millennials, Gen X, and Gen Z to mingle like the good ole days.

One problem, though. The ice.

I’ve been on a gin kick for about a year, forgoing the other wistful bottles on my bar cart for my besties Roku and Hendrick’s. My go-to cocktails are The Last Word (an ethereal combination of gin, green chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and lime juice) or The Aviation (gin, maraschino liqueur, creme de violette, and lemon juice)—not to be confused with the gin of the same name.

But when I’m out and about, dipping my toe into an unknown establishment, I typically opt for what industry folks call a “spirit-forward” cocktail, meaning no mixers that could taint the quality of the drink. For me, that’s a negroni—equal parts gin, Campari, sweet vermouth, and an orange peel. Bitter, like my mood after the rats have attacked a pile of garbage outside my apartment building, but the color of a sunrise, reminding me that each new day brings potential.

But when this particular negroni arrived, I gasped like Truman Capote after the Swans rejected him. The drink arrived overflowing with a scoop of standard icemaker cubes. What the f*ck? Where was my crystal-clear frozen orb?

Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash

1MC takeaway: For the love of all things intoxicating, ice matters. According to the London Spirits Competition (and what sounds more official than that?), “Better the quality and the proportion of ice and other ingredients in a cocktail, better the taste. To put in a nutshell, a cocktail without ice is as equal to a night sky without stars.”