In our previous post, we talked about how an ice company, Favourite Ice, is making hand cut, clear, 2 inch artisan ice cubes and selling them to restaurants to use within their cocktails. Some of the restaurants are charging an extra dollar to their clientele to pay for the extra cost of the high-end ice.

The question we are asking is whether you can make ice exactly the same or similar to this in your own home so you can enjoy fancy ice with your cocktails and serve them to your guests. Like worthwhile experiment, we started with a baseline for analyze comparisons. Our baseline was a 2 inch cube made out of regular tap water when using the Acuisina King Sized Ice Tray. My regular water has a large calcium content so one would expect it to produce cloudy ice and it did.

The restaurants offering Artisan Ice have stated the cubes are clear and void of mineral taste since they're made with filtered water. My second test at making totally clear ice was using demineralized water in the Acuisina tray. While they seemed to be less cloudy, still not the perfection we were looking to get.

The third method was to utilize water filtered inside a Brita water pitcher. The results ended up improving. I then tried boiling filtered water, cooling it, boiling it once again and cooling it before freezing it. This resulted in a better outcome having less cloudiness. Nevertheless, the method that seemed to procure the best results was boiling filtered water and putting it inside the mold while the water was still hot and then placing it in the freezer. This method seemed to result in the least amount of bubbles and cloudiness.

While none of these methods achieved a perfectly clear cube, it is important to make note of that the businesses making artisan ice are employing very expensive commercial equipment to obtain that perfect clarity. So, for household use, boiling filtered water before freezing it and adding it to the freezer while still hot, comes pretty near to the perfectly clear cube. It still accomplishes all the other benefits of artisan ice: it looks impressive inside a drink, it melts slower due to less surface area and it chills your drink without diluting it.