We’ve Hit Peak Cocktail Ice When it comes to ice, does size matter? Well, that all depends on the drink. “If you’re serving a slow sipping cocktail, like an Old Fashioned, you want a big block of ice because the dilution is slower,” explains Tom Macy, New York-based cocktail educator and founder of Social Hour Cocktails. “Or if you’re shaking a cocktail and want more aeration to give a drink more foaminess, then you want big cubes, too.” For some, this kind of technical detail is what the increasingly nerdy world of mixology is all about. In recent years, the cocktail world has become more than a little obsessed, not so much with invention or ingredients as with chunks of frozen water. Much as dealers in diamonds — that metaphoric “ice” — are preoccupied with the “three Cs” of cut, carat and clarity, so dealers in cocktails are likewise microscopically attentive to the cold stuff, some bringing blowtorches, bandsaws, Japanese steel picks and even CNC machines to carve their own. | 