"the invention will cut down on "the wastage of water used to cool people's drinks"
Wastage water... This has to be for real, because you just couldn't possibly make it up.
Fancy paying someone to start up yet another pebbles-in-your-whisky firm? Well then step this way, because El Reg has discovered a new "disruptive" lifestyle brand which will charge you the earth to put a rock in your grog. A company called Boozestones' eponymous product aims to persuade drinkers to do away with frozen water …
Smallbrainfield,
There's nothing wrong with adding water to whisky. That's a sensible thing to do. Some taste nicer with a drop of water. I can't remember trying a single whisky both ways, where even just a splash of water doesn't make a noticeable (to large) difference to the taste. Some I prefer with, others without.
The problem with ice is cold, not wet. Chilling whisky destroys most of the flavour. Or at least turns it off until you warm it up again.
So what they've done is to remove any possible good aspects of what ice can do to whisky, and kept only the bad effects. That's magic! The fact that he's asking for start-up funding to make something that's already been available for years, is just icing on the cake of pointlessness.
A little bit of soft, room temperature water does indeed help unlock the nose of a good whisky. Cooling drinks with ice, on the other hand, reduces what you can smell and taste. Hence ice should be reserved for drinks that are unpalatable unless chilled, such as Coke, or Bourbon.
If you need to chill your whisk(e)y to enjoy it then it's either very bad whisk(e)y or you don't actually like whisk(e)y.
Or its a proper cask strength and what you're doing with just one icecube is slowly watering it while drinking. Cask at 60 or 70% vol tastes very different to bottle strength at 40%. Both are pleasant, and while enjoying a cask strength single malt with the correct balance of icecubes, you get to enjoy the transitions between the two.
You've still got to cool them down in a freezer, same as ice.
What about cleaning?! You've got to wash these after every use! At least with ice cubes you simply drink them and they're recycled by the user. I certainly don't want your whisky/spittle covered stones in my drink without a wash first thanks! Oh and lots of dishwasher detergent too!
No, you're wrong it's better for the world!
We'll just gloss over the blasting of rock, the huge amount of fuel and energy required to transport and process the rock, the huge amounts of water used to keep the cutting blades cool and then the amount of fuel used to transport these to the shops, then the energy that would be used to chill the water is still used to chill the rocks.
No they ARE better, honest.
We'll just gloss over the blasting of rock, the huge amount of fuel and energy required to transport and process the rock, the huge amounts of water used to keep the cutting blades cool
Well, this is soapstone, which you can cut with a butter knife. When I did the soapstone counters for my kitchen, I cut it with a fibre blade on my table saw. And it can easily be polished by hand with a bit of sandpaper. No water required, strictly speaking.
Not that I think this company is planning on doing anything in a terribly efficient manner. (Though, if this idea took off, I suppose I could start selling hand-cut artisanal soapstone whiskey blocks. Don't let lousy mass-produced rocks ruin the taste of your beverage! Each of mine is lovingly crafted with your intoxication in mind. Wash before using.)
I know that some donors want to be anonymous, but it isn't supposed to be because you donated to something really stupid.
So does anyone know of a better alternative? Rather than getting a cut off of lottery winners with no pretense of a concern as to whether anything was accomplished, I'm looking for something like Kickstarter/IndieGoGo, but where they actually EARN their cut by providing project management support. Here are some of the questions that should be addressed in a project that I'd be motivated to support (and even want to see my name associated with as one of the donors):
(1) What are the required resources, including personal commitments?
(2) What is the schedule?
(3) What are the itemized costs? Including fair payment to the workers, I hope.
(4) Is there any testing required?
(5) What is the total budget?
(6) Is this project part of a larger project? Foundational or additional?
(7) What does success look like?
To my way of thinking, the success criteria of (7) are the most important. It would be nice to look over my donations and see how many projects I'd supported that actually accomplished what they promised. Then I'd have a basis to donate some more money. Not that I'm rich, but I think even small donors should be treated with more respect than they get these days.
Ice works because it changes phase. Rocks don't.
A cleverer idea would be 92% filling the inside of a hollow metal (e.g. silver) sphere with water and leaving the rest as vacuum to deal with the expansion. Then you'd have high conductivity, phase change and no dilution. Maybe use an internal matrix structure to help conductivity and add strength, allowing the walls to be thinner.
It's so obvious that I assume someone's done it already and probably patented it.
A cleverer idea would be 92% filling the inside of a hollow metal (e.g. silver) sphere with water and leaving the rest as vacuum to deal with the expansion. Then you'd have high conductivity, phase change and no dilution. Maybe use an internal matrix structure to help conductivity and add strength, allowing the walls to be thinner.
It's so obvious that I assume someone's done it already and probably patented it.
The dangers of over thinking. I mean, I know that yours are better engineered and more effective
As a back of the envelope calculation, a 2cm ice cube will take approx 3kJ to melt from a freezer temperature of -20C, once you include latent heat of fusion. The same size soapstone, although three times the mass, only takes ~500J to raise to 0C.
I'm fairly sure you can get ice cubes in flexible plastic that will cool drinks without diluting them, but that wouldn't be pretentious enough - which is the real point here. It's not about how you like your drink, it's about affectation.
"I'm fairly sure you can get ice cubes in flexible plastic that will cool drinks without diluting them"
Yes. Little plastic pink elephant ice "cubes" have been available since at least the mid-80's. Oh, how we still laugh every time we find one in our drink even after all these years.
Put a suitable amount in a shot glass, with (say) a spoon or something else that can serve as a suitable handle upright in it. Place in freezer. Wait. Retrieve from freezer.
If you're lucky, you might be able to remove the shot glass without breaking it - although I suspect it might need to be smashed. But whatever... hey presto. A whisk[e]y lollypop.
Note: Untested. It just seems like an interesting idea.
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After taking the frozen water off the top, he ended up with really strong, cold whiskey
So he reinvented freeze distillation. Pretty commonly used to produce ice beers and wines, cold meads, applejack, etc.
(Wikipedia points out that freeze distillation concentrates "poisonous congeners" - i.e., fermentation products other than ethyl alcohol - rather than evaporating them as heat distillation does.)
That would be a series of experiments in which the measuring instrument is affected by each experiment. Not scientifically sound but good fun I'd say.
Think bigger: each experiment affects the measuring instrument, but the instrument is reset over a period of hours/days. Therefore it is necessary to investigate in one order (stainless, soapstone, ice, ...), then rotate through the various permutations. Not a short-term experiment, but bound to be immensely satisfying.
By the time there's enough samples for statistical rigour, it would be a great deal of fun.
On a tour of the Glen Moray (shameless plug - you know where to send a crate :) ) distillery, we finished with a taster of the finished product. In actual fact three versions ... an 8 a 12 and a 16 year old dram.
The young - but spectacularly well informed guide - pointed out a little water jug which had some spring water they actually make the whisky from. At this point, one chap, who had been playing the connoisseur commented rather smugly "Glad you have some water for the ladies" (he was an arse). To which the guide, not-quite-as-apologetically-as-he-could-have-been pointed out that professional whisky tasters always put a splash of water into whisky to sample it. Apparently it releases some of the flavouring compounds, thus accenting the nose (smell), and allows the more complex compounds to dissolve, bringing out the more subtle edges of the taste.
So there is a reason.
I did one of the every-region tasting sessions at the Whisky Experience in Edinburgh when on the second day of a stag. The first bottle we sampled was a barrel proof lowlands, can't remember what. At a little over 60% ABV and after a night's worth of fairly heavy drinking, I was very glad to hear our (also young but spectacularly well-informed) guide suggest diluting it 2:1 whisky:water, which made it really rather pleasant. I did try some neat but it was pretty much all alcohol burn and no real discernible flavour. Even as a relative Scotch novice the difference was massive.
Never seen the appeal in adding any cooling assistance to whisk(e)y. All it seems to do is remove the majority of the flavour.