“Ice is the most important part of your drink,” declares Jay Khan, founder of the agave-focused bar Coa. “It controls the dilution and temperature of your cocktail. I’d say that 98 per cent of our drinks here use ice, so it’s essential. Not to mention, good clear ice just looks sexy.”
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Many crucial steps go towards the creation of the perfect cocktail – a good base, the right vessel, an accurate shake or stir – but that frozen water could be so crucial is a surprising professional confession in an industry that has become more upscale in recent years.

Even if you’ve perfected your mixology skills and filled your cabinets with fancy glasses and bartending tools, your homemade Old Fashioned or Aperol Spritz will never live up to the ones served at a craft-cocktail bar if you use cloudy ice cubes that smell vaguely like the leftovers you’ve been storing in the freezer. As Mathew Resler, the head bartender at Bar Goto, says, “Ice is an integral ingredient when making cocktails. The appearance, dilution ratio, taste, and purity are all essential to a proper drink.”
Resler and the other bartenders I asked about how to make perfect ice all pointed me to journalist Camper English, who writes about cocktails and spirits and pioneered the technique that most professionals now use to make ice (after experimenting with the frozen stuff for a decade).