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- We sell clear ice for cocktails.
We're producing over 100,000 pounds a week,
and people love the clarity.
It looks really impressive to someone
who's never seen this ice before.
If you're going to pay top dollar for a superior cocktail,
then the frozen water that goes into that cocktail
should be as important an ingredient
as everything else that goes into it.
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(machine whirring)
We generally start work
between five and six in the morning.
Obviously, our product is perishable,
so we need to protect our investment.
We're spending a lot of time in sub-zero temperatures,
and it's something that you have to be prepared for
and something that you have to be accustomed to
after a time.
So we like to keep things
just below 32 in the production room.
These are our ice block-makers.
Each machine will produce
two, 300-pound blocks every two days.
And today's the day when we are going to harvest our ice.
We're harvesting two to three times a week.
That gives you an idea
of how much ice we're actually harvesting.
So New York City tap water is actually regarded
as some of the best in the country,
if not the best, for drinking.
But we take measures to filter it extensively
through a proprietary method.
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The ice cubes in your freezer at home are cloudy,
and that is an example of oxygen bubbles
at the core of that cube attempting to push their way out.
And each chamber has a pump which circulates the water.
This way, no oxygen bubbles or impurities
have an opportunity to freeze in the block.
So as the water's circulating
and it's freezing from the bottom up,
which is the opposite of what would happen
in a lake or a pond, that would freeze from the top down.
So this is mimicking but inverting that process.
As a testament to how clear this ice is,
although you might think that I'm looking
at a bathtub full of water,
I can't move my hand any further than that
because the ice is right here.
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The last layer to achieve a frozen state
will get vacuumed off and the result
will be a crystal-clear 300-pound block.
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These are 300 pounds, so quite heavy.
And this is quite possibly the most dangerous part
of the process because you're dealing
with a really heavy block suspended in mid-air.
So we're taking the block that we just harvested
and then we're gonna cut some slabs
that we would then bring to our bandsaw.
So this is just an electric chainsaw
with a mill that we modified and customized
so that we can get specific measurements of slabs.
Then you have to also account for the width of the blade.
We try to achieve a minimal amount of waste.
So this is the raw product from the block
that we would then take and feed through the chainsaw.
Throughout my career as a bartender,
going back to Milk and Honey and Little Branch
in the early aughts, ice was always a very important part
of our cocktail program.
We were responsible for freezing our own blocks of ice.
So clarity wasn't necessarily the focus back then.
It was more about size and shape and temperature.
And then when Sasha and myself opened Dutch Kills,
I learned that very close
by to Dutch kills was Okamoto Studio who make ice
as sculptors and certainly had a vast understanding
and knowledge of frozen water
that as bartenders, we didn't necessarily possess.
From learning and working with Takeo and Shintaro Okamoto,
we were able to learn more
about how the ice actually could be applied even better
to our drinks.
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So now that we made our slabs off of the big block,
we're gonna take our slabs and trim them down.
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A lot of bars and restaurants will buy slabs
in different sizes and they'll actually
cut them down themselves behind the bar.
This is Pedro Duran, he's our shop manager.
He's been with us since day one in 2011.
Pedro is the maestro.
We're basically just gonna cut two-inch cubes.
This is probably one of our most popular cuts.
Clear ice is a good indication
that your ice is devoid of impurities and oxygen bubbles,
but the two most important factors
really are size and temperature.
The big ice melts slower, stays colder longer,
and does not impart unwanted water content to a cup.
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So we're gonna take these and cut our highball spears
which we use for long drinks,
Collins, bucks, and a lot of bars
like to put these in their cocktails.
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This is another shape that we do.
We have a common drill press
that we have customized and modified
in order to create our spheres.
Spheres will actually melt slower in a cocktail
than a cube based upon surface area and size.
So that's how it looks when it comes out.
So this is something that a lot of our clients
will ask us for, is specialty ice.
And we freeze things into our cubes,
golf balls, scorpions, flowers.
We've done just about everything here.
We have Raymundo and Jorge.
They're with us here on the assembly line
and they're cleaning up our cubes and making sure
that everything looks nice before it goes out for delivery.
We have lights below and we have lights above
and they can hold up the ice to the light
and make sure that it is of top quality.
These are the cubes that didn't quite make it.
Something like that or a chip on the other side.
Any imperfection such as this would not make it to a client.
It has to be perfect.
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So we'll use this scrap ice for stirring cocktails.
We'll use it in cocktails
that don't require perfect cuts of ice,
so for a caipirinha or we might use a very small piece
to shake like a Collins or a buck or a highball.
So we try not to waste anything.
And ultimately, our goal is to recycle everything
and be completely sustainable to the point where not a drop
of water hits the floor of the shop.
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So we probably have just in this room alone,
roughly 20,000 pounds of ice today
but that number could change.
Because on any given day,
we may have to increase production.
Ice in and of itself is not timeless.
Once this ice goes to the bar,
it becomes a very fragile element.
We're delivering 10,000 pounds a day.
We have to be very careful
because it's a perishable material,
and that must be very carefully regulated
from the moment it leaves the freezer.
Yeah, so each bag will indicate what we're delivering.
So on average, we're delivering 10,000 cubes a day,
six days a week.
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So our trucks are obviously climate-controlled,
refrigerated freezer trucks.
So every morning our route gets planned out
and that's across all five boroughs.
We're not just putting the ice in there randomly.
We do it strategically.
So we know that timing is always important
because time and temperature are your two worst enemies.
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Today we delivered to Atoboy,
Cut by Wolfgang Puck, Sant Ambroeus Lafayette,
Employees Only, and the list goes on.
We have to work with it very carefully
and very respectfully so that when it gets to our clients,
they can take it knowing that it's not gonna last forever
in the glass.
I'm going to Dutch Kills in Long Island City.
So this is what we call our three-by-twos.
We use these in like an Old Fashioned at Dutch Kills.
So this is one that we use quite a bit.
We call these tall rocks,
and we use these primarily for shaking cocktails.
You can also use this for like a spirit
on the rock in sort of a smaller whiskey glass.
And then these are our highball spears.
So we would use this for any type of long drink or highball.
Fresh-caught, farm-to-table, freezer-to-cocktail.
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So I primarily introduce myself to somebody
in passing as a bartender because that's my trade,
that's why I do this.
We're bartenders and this company was founded
by bartenders for bartenders.
So because now the big clear ice cube
has become somewhat ubiquitous and almost de rigueur
in cocktail bars that really care
about their beverage program.
This would be our shaking cube
and it will help us to aerate the cocktail
while making it as cold as possible without worrying
about the ice shaking or breaking inside the shaker.
So when you shake with the big ice cube,
you have the advantage
of controlling and regulating temperature and water content
and you can strain to the last drop and everyone
will see that you are pouring a perfect cocktail
and not leaving anything left over in the shaker.
Ask your neighborhood bartender
to show you what's left over.
Here, you're getting every last penny from this cocktail.
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For this one, I'm going to use the sphere.
These are the scraps that you saw.
They don't go down the drain, they go into the cocktail.
Clear ice is a good indication
that your ice is devoid of impurities and oxygen bubbles
which can be detrimental to your cocktail.
If you're shaking with ice
that has lots of oxygen bubbles or striations,
that ice is going to crack apart right away in your shaker
and create unwanted water content for your cocktail.
But if you have a very cold,
dense piece of crystal clear ice
it gives you more liberty to shake longer
and actually aerate your cocktail
and bring it down to a colder temperature.
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So this is an ice sphere, which is going to melt slower
than a traditional cube 'cause of the surface area.
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We keep all our glassware frozen
because we do anything possible to serve a colder cocktail.
So whatever we can within our power,
whatever we can do, we will do.
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So this is the Old Fashioned at Dutch Kills.
It's a three-prong ice pick.
It's really great for everything that we do behind the bar.
The importance of putting the ice
in the cocktail at the right temperature, making sure
that it comes out of the freezer and you temper it
before it goes in the glass so that you don't get that pop.
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It's the Old Fashioned,
it's about as old-fashioned as they get.
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It is very cool to be able to come to work
and take out the tools and work on something
and just find ways to solve problems that ultimately
will make a better cocktail for somebody down the line.
Even as a bartender, you have to have an eye
for precision because it has to start from a raw product
and it has to end up being something beautiful.
In the end, this is a food item.
We wanna treat it with the same respect
as anyone would for anything that they're presenting
onto a plate or an into a cocktail.
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The ultimate goal is to provide
a superior cocktail no matter what.
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