How to Carve an Ice Ball

OH NO! MY WHISK(E)Y IS TOO WARM AND MY BEER IS LOSING ITS FUNNESS!!

Start with Yamazaki 12

As pictured above, if you want to carve an ice ball, first you’ll need Japanese whisky, beer, an ice pick, a small knife, a giant Hattori Hanzo knife and a big block o’ ice. The ice pictured was carved off of an big block of grocery store ice. These are good for practice, but they are made from “compressed ice,” which is exactly what it sounds like, basically left over ice filled with air. This is not what you want. The entire purpose of the ice ball is to maximize surface area and minimize melting with clear ice, bereft of air. The easiest way to get this ice is to take warm water, and put it in your freezer, set to the coldest, overnight, that’ll be pretty clear. As for how to cut block ice, thats what the Hattori Hanzo is for. Score the ice, then trap it with the ice pick and it will cut a pretty perfect line. (Video on my facebook, wordpress doesn’t support that file)

Cut the Corners

So first of, take your cube and cut off all eight corners, and you’ll get a
thing that looks about like this.

Hand cut ice ball too big for the average whisky glass

After that, take off each one of those corners. And well, that’s pretty much a ball. You can then just smooth it out with the small paring knife or perhaps use a vegetable peeler, though this is not as cool.

I had to cut it down a little bit

Place whiskey on ice and drink. Note on practicing this, you are going to hurt yourself if you aren’t careful. You’ll notice the beer cans in the picture, I only drank two of those before carving the ice ball. Be safe, and perhaps practice this technique in a job with a killer workman comp program.

If this blog sounds braggy and non-specific its because its in response to a post that my friend Andrew Friedman posted about the worst bartending video ever. But really, you should read more about Japanese Whiskey at his site.