The ice machine is an essential tool of the cocktail craft. The early era of the cocktail relied on the wide-reaching ice trade (headed most prominently by Frederic Tudor, Boston’s “Ice King”), which harvested ice from lakes and ponds in winter, then stored and distributed the ice to hotels, bars, restaurants, and other ventures. While artificial refrigeration was developed as early as 1748 (as demonstrated by William Cullen at the University of Glasgow), the first documented production of “artificial” ice was in 1844, when John Gorrie, a Florida-based physician, experimented with ice production while searching for ways to cool the rooms of patients suffering from yellow fever. Gorrie was granted a patent in 1851 for a machine that produces ice, but attempts to commercialize the project were crushed by Tudor. In 1853, Alexander Twining gained a patent for an ice-making machine, and a similar patent was granted in Australia to James Harrison in 1855. The first artificial-ice plants in the United States appeared in 1860, and by 1909 there were around two thousand in operation; these plants produced ice in 200-pound blocks, made by submerging containers filled with fresh water into tanks of salt water (which freezes at a lower temperature) cooled to below 0° C. The first machine to produce edible, tube-shaped ice was introduced in 1929 by Jurgen Hans, who in 1932 founded Külinda in Frankfurt; the company is still involved in refrigeration technology.
Today’s ice machines function largely in a similar manner to the earliest machines. A low-pressure refrigerant vapor is pressurized by a compressor; a condenser converts this vapor into a high-pressure liquid, which is drained out through a throttle valve. This process depressurizes the liquid, which is conducted to an evaporator, where heat exchange occurs, dropping the temperature. Commercial icemakers operate by running water across a stainless-steel evaporator cooled below the freezing point; horizontal evaporators wash more air and dissolved solids away as the water cools, resulting in harder, clearer, cleaner ice, whereas vertical evaporators may operate faster but can produce softer, “wetter” ice.
Home icemakers typically use vertical evaporators to produce cubes or half-moons of ice. Bars and restaurants use commercial machines from producers including Manitowoc, Ice-O-Matic, and Scotsman, and the most widely utilized machines produce either pebble ice or dimpled cubes for use in soft drinks. With the early twenty-first-century cocktail renaissance, bartenders began to turn their attention to different styles of ice production and different types of ice machines. While some bars tap nineteenth-century technology by purchasing large blocks of ice (or producing them in-house with machines such as the cult favorite Clinebell model) and then cutting or crushing the ice for service, others have turned to horizontal-evaporator machines for the colder, clearer ice they produce.
See also ice, science of its use; and ice, history of its use.
Chapel, George. “Gorrie’s Fridge.” http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~ihas/gorrie/fridge.htm (accessed February 17, 2021).
Parker, Ian. “The Emperor of Ice.” New Yorker, February 12, 2001. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/02/12/the-emperor-of-ice-2 (accessed February 17, 2021).
Scherlinder Morse, Minna. “Chilly Reception.” Smithsonian, July 2002. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/chilly-reception-66099329/?no-ist (accessed February 17, 2021).
By: Paul Clarke