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APPLIED FIZZICS · Field Notes · Edition No. 15
A whimsical look at the universe through a glass of Champagne (or your favorite cocktail).
November 10, 2026 · Seattle, Washington
Dear Reader,
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, a hollow stainless-steel donut containing ordinary water ice, sealed inside.
This week, we're putting it to the test.
The Experiment
We prepared two identical cocktails, each containing 50 mL of bourbon and 50 mL of diet ginger ale.
For our reference experiment, we used chilled stainless-steel ball bearings and 60 grams of ordinary ice.
For our second experiment, we used STEEL ICE: approximately the same amount of stainless steel, with 60 grams of ice sealed inside.
Both cocktails were monitored using our Raspberry Pi temperature logger.
Our question was simple: Could STEEL ICE cool the cocktail as effectively as ordinary ice, even though the meltwater never touched the drink?
We genuinely didn't know.
The Results
The results surprised us. Here's a graph of temperature versus time for the reference cocktail versus the STEEL ICE cocktail.
Our reference cocktail reached a minimum temperature of approximately 3.5°C. STEEL ICE reached 2.75°C.
After 45 minutes, the STEEL ICE cocktail was more than two degrees colder than our reference cocktail. And after more than an hour, it was still remarkably cold.
But the most dramatic difference wasn't temperature.
It was dilution.
Our 60 grams of ordinary ice melted into approximately 60 mL of water, increasing the original cocktail volume from 100 mL to approximately 160 mL.
STEEL ICE added no meltwater whatsoever.
Physics Corner
The Heat of Fusion
Ice doesn't cool a drink simply because it's cold.
Much of its cooling capacity comes from the energy it absorbs as it melts. This is called the latent heat of fusion.
For water, the heat of fusion is approximately 334 joules per gram.
That means melting 60 grams of ice absorbs about 20,000 joules of energy.
And here's the key point: the ice doesn't need to touch the cocktail directly.
In STEEL ICE, heat flows through the stainless-steel shell and melts the ice inside. The cocktail loses heat, but the meltwater stays trapped inside the donut.
We get the cooling benefit of the phase change—without the dilution.
The Dilution Solution?
These experiments suggest that STEEL ICE can deliver excellent cooling while preserving the original concentration of a cocktail.
It's just one set of experiments, and we're certainly not claiming to have completed a comprehensive scientific study. But the results were surprising enough that we're eager to investigate further.
And as a certain British secret agent's gadget specialist might say, sometimes a little engineering can solve a rather interesting problem.
Neither shaken nor stirred. Just chilled.
We have another quiz for you this week:
Until next time, stay curious.
Cheers,
Evan Wallace
President, Applied Fizzics Inc.
Makers of The Perlage System®
Want more Champagne science, carbonation experiments, and assorted investigations? Visit the Applied Fizzics Field Notes archive .
