Applied Fizzics Field Notes

Can we get all the cooling benefits of ice without diluting our cocktail? For the past few weeks, we've been investigating one of the great cocktail controversies: shaken versus stirred. But what if we could avoid the question altogether? What if we could chill a cocktail without adding any water to it? That's the idea behind STEEL ICE.

Last week, we put James Bond's famous preference for shaken, not stirred martinis to the test. We discovered that shaking chilled a martini faster than stirring, but also produced considerably more dilution. But one of our readers raised an excellent question: Was that really a fair comparison? So what would happen if we shook and stirred two identical martinis until they reached the same temperature, rather than mixing them for the same amount of time? Along the way, we establish a remarkably useful rule of thumb for predicting dilution in cocktails.

James Bond famously preferred his martinis shaken, not stirred. He also preferred vodka to gin—an offense so egregious that, for the purposes of this blog, we're simply going to pretend it never happened. But shaken versus stirred? Now THAT is a question worthy of scientific investigation. Does shaking make a colder martini? Does it add more water? Or is the whole thing just a matter of personal preference?

Does adding more ice to your cocktail mean more dilution? Or could the opposite actually be true? It seems perfectly logical. More ice means more stuff that can melt, and more melting means more water in your drink. But as we've discovered in Field Notes, common sense and thermodynamics don't always agree. We do a careful experiment that reveals more ice can actually mean LESS dilution. Along the way, we uncover the 20% rule of thumb that can help bartenders estimate the dilution in their reciepes.

Everybody knows cold things make your drinks cold. And as it turns out, nothing does it better than ice. But do you know why ice is the best at it? And how much ice a Snickers Bar could melt? And why citrus farmers in Florida spray their trees with water during a frost? Find out in Field Notes #12...you'll never look at ice the same way again.

We asked Archimedes what happens when a chunk of ice melts in a brim-full glass of water: Does the water level overflow, fall, or stay the same? Then we asked what would happen if there was a pebble frozen in the ice cube. Then we asked what would happen if there was a huge bubble frozen into it. We thought we caught it on a perfect three-hour time-lapse, but we had our Bigfoot moment: we only got one grainy image of an amazing floating tower of ice. 

Put an ice cube in a glass of water and it floats. Hardly breaking news. But that familiar observation is one of water’s most consequential peculiarities. It helps fish survive winter. It explains the tip of an iceberg, and played a role in the wreck of the Titanic. And it lets us fill a glass right to the brim, leave a sizable chunk of ice sticking out of it, and ask a question: Will the glass overflow? Somewhere along the way, while waiting for the ice to melt, we talked about the stability of atomic nuclei and the origin of the cosmos. What??