Lake-harvested cocktail ice is an old business making a comeback in Norway

https://vinepair.com/articles/lake-harvested-cocktail-ice-returns/

by ohjeez • 1 year ago

40 42 1 year ago

I also have ice for my cocktails, with water from a Scandinavia lake. It comes from my tap.

“I hope that the businesses open their eyes more and more, and understand that it’s important to have good quality of ice with a good story,”

Most cocktails bar already have good quality ice, I do wonder How a good story taste?

The environmental waste of shipping ice just seems silly.

writtenAnswer• 1 year ago

seems more like a novelty item

burkaman4• 1 year ago

It's not even a good story. "You are drinking unfiltered lake water" is not appetizing.

dagss2• 1 year ago

Not disagreeing about the point of lake ice, but about apetizing -- as a Norwegian, I would much rather drink directly from a Norwegian lake in the mountains than tap water from any city, Norwegian or European. Much tastier.

Drilling through the ice for drinking water is common (well, if you have a cabin near a mountain lake). Closest you would get in many cities is purchasing highest quality bottled water, except that has been stored in plastic.

iancmceachern5• 1 year ago

If you add up the cost of shipping the water, either in bottles or in pipes, and the electricity, including line losses, it starts to be more even I expect.

We often think, in our modern world, that water and power are free at our homes.

yapyap• 1 year ago

yeah.. no

lemonberry• 1 year ago

"I do wonder How a good story taste?"

When I was a bartender if we had a wine that wasn't selling we'd do two things: raise the price and improve the story around it. The story involved researching the vineyard, the wine maker, and the grapes involved in the wine. Once the staff has the story then it's easy to sell it.

People are very gullible. About a lot of things. It's especially comical with wine because a lot of people are convinced they're super tasters.

Raising the price is an easy win. There's always some guy saying, "you get what you pay for!" as if wine were priced on it's taste or quality.

My experience as a bartender and a bachelors in philosophy have given me great appreciation for cognitive biases.

hammock• 1 year ago

Just give me the cheapest wine that’s single-origin and not loaded with mega purple

jfengel• 1 year ago

We pay for stories all the time. It's entertainment. Your beverages are also a form of entertainment.

I'm OK with paying more for a wine that comes with a good story. It does have a different effect on me than one without, even if the chemical makeup is identical. I probably won't buy it more than once -- but I might, if the story resonates especially well.

ahmeneeroe-v22• 1 year ago

The price thing is probably a cognitive bias but not really the story thing.

People go to a bar for a good time. If you took the time to tell them a story about a wine, they probably had a good time hearing about that and were willing to pay to continue participating in that story.

I'm laughing that you're citing your philosophy degree and seem to have missed the boat about people searching for meaning in their life, jumping straight to cognitive biases (which aren't even a philosophical subject).

adolph• 1 year ago

You may think that ice is ice. I'm not going to disagree that Norwegian lake ice is likely the same as locally produced freezer ice. However, there are interesting properties to kinds of ice with unexplored culinary properties.

If cooled very rapidly, liquid water forms a glass e rather than crystallizing to hexagonal ice, for example, hyperquenched glassy water. [0]

0. https://water.lsbu.ac.uk/water/amorphous_ice.html

*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_ice

hatthew• 1 year ago

environmental waste

From the article:

It concluded that one could send the lake ice 286 miles by truck, 1,438 miles by rail, or 4,284 miles by container ship until it broke even with the energy required to produce a Clinebell block.

This report was of course commissioned by the business in question so it is likely biased, but generally speaking it seems clear that shipping natural ice and freezing your own ice are roughly comparable in terms of environmental impact.

sigmar• 1 year ago

They mention visual checks for dead animals, and bacterial tests. But what about checks for heavy metals? Viruses? Radioactivity? (My understanding is that viruses are frequently durable to temperature changes because, unlike bacteria, they don't have a cell wall that will get damaged when frozen) This seems like a naturalistic fallacy to assume random ice you find is safe to drink...

magicalhippo2• 1 year ago

Here[1] is what the gov't says on the topic. Mostly stay way from water that's near farmland and after heavy rainfall. Apart from that it's quite safe here.

As for radioactivity, AFAIK the primary source would be radon from granite and similar rocks. It shouldn't be a problem for a lake, though can be a concern if you have a well[2].

[1] https://www.fhi.no/sm/drikkevann/rad/for-du-drikker-vann-ret...

[2] https://dsa.no/radon/radon-i-vann

burkaman4• 1 year ago

This lake is surrounded on almost all sides by farmland: https://maps.app.goo.gl/FyZoCWM1YwAvWcCi9

gwbas1c2• 1 year ago

This seems like a naturalistic fallacy to assume random ice you find is safe to drink

Gosh how did our ancestors survive?

burkaman4• 1 year ago

Often they didn't.

BadBadJellyBean• 1 year ago

Yes. Let's haul tons of ice through the country that is potentially even dirty. Just so that some has more interesting ice in their drink.

voidfunc• 1 year ago

Yea I'll pass... you can make high quality ice fairly easily and you can guarantee it meets some basic cleanliness standards.

This feels like the ultimate hipster cocktail phenomenon.

mattmaroon• 1 year ago

It really is. The basic hipsterization cycle goes like this:

1. Humans suffer with crappy situation due to lack of technology for years. (In this case, water-borne illnesses that killed most humans for our first X years as a species, where X is like 1925 - whenever humans first came on the scene).

2. Humans invent technology that makes life better and stop suffering from crappy situation entirely.

3. Hipsters think crappy situation was probably kinda awesome and elect to go back to it. Before 2020, anti-vaxxers were largely hipsters. Unpasteurized milk is a good current example too.

evbogue• 1 year ago

Legend has it that my great great (great?) grandfather was heavily invested in lake ice exports from Norway to warmer places. Then the refrigerator was invented, he went under on his boat, and made the controversial decision to move to America in hopes of finding prosperity not long before the great depression. It's reassuring to see this ancient industry is coming back via automation.

iancmceachern5• 1 year ago

You need to watch put in SF for this kind of thing too.

If you have a water delivery service and they deliver "live water" it's this. Just pond or spring water, un filtered. Thats why they have to refrigerate it.

lupusreal• 1 year ago

Hopefully it's spring water, not pond water. Many springs are effectively filtered by the soil and are perfectly safe to drink from, but I wouldn't want to risk pond water. Lake water is better, ponds are just nasty though.

iancmceachern5• 1 year ago

If it's collected deep in the earth. A spring can also mean what is basically a pond. Often this water in question is collected from the later.

hahamrfunnyguy• 1 year ago

This ice has provenance. Makes sense since when it comes to fancy wines and spirits that's what you're paying for after a certain point.

boomboomsubban• 1 year ago

It feels like any discussion about transporting ice from Norway should at least mention "the world's greatesr greatest publicity stunt" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_block_expedition_of_1959

hobos_delight• 1 year ago

And of course the Sydney Ice Berg https://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_sydney_iceberg

potato3732842• 1 year ago

Kinda cool how modern refrigeration is so good and cheap people can larp the old expensive in their time ways of refrigeration (having your drink cooled by lake ice that was cut and stored) as a novelty.

nielsbot• 1 year ago

I mean.. what about algae and amoebas and such? I don't seen the appeal of naturally harvested ice. I guess if it's harvested from close by then the carbon footprint could be much lower than artificially frozen water... but the carbon footprint of ice making in general is probably low relative to other things, like driving, or air travel.

Lake-harvested cocktail ice is an old business making a comeback in Norway

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