Drinking cocktails with a single enormous ice cube

In my experience, cold glasses (even with thick walls etc) tend to hold the drink not as long as cold as with a large ice cube, especially as many cocktails are for longer time sipping (>30 minutes). In addition, cocktail recipes/ratios include expected dilution from ice (during shaking and later in the glass) so that you might have to change cocktail recipes when you would go from ice cube to cold glass

Harry Craddock (author of the Savoy Cocktail Book) famously said that a cocktail is best consumed “quickly, while it’s still laughing at you.” But you do you.

A glass will not, of course, be as effective as ice. Water has enormous heat capacity. Ice has to absorb a lot of energy to make the phase change to water. Only then can it then get hotter than 0 C./ 32 F.

I prefer to slowly sip 2-3 cocktails when go to a good bar - at least for me cocktails aren’t anything to drink fast

I hate nothing more than a martini that is no longer ice cold. I, too, tend to drink while it’s cold

Indeed - warm martini kind of gives jet fuel vibes

There is a whole class of room temperature cocktails, “Scaffas” … maybe those are the most ideal choice to spend a really long time with? But at this point, I’m thinking I’d rather just pour a glass of wine.

There was a place on 57th & 6th in Manhattan that served martinis in a stemless glass planted in a bowl of crushed ice, so that it stayed cold for a very long time. This was an excellent system.

(It also has the distinction of being where I went on my last date with someone other than my future husband.)

Your future husband? What was that shindig we went to last year, then???

He was my future husband then!

I think I’d say “now-husband.”

Okay. But I prefer my phrasing. I think it reads better.

The standard cocktail party joke is “..and this is my future ex-“ or, “current future ex-“

I think the first place I heard that was actually Jurassic Park - Jeff Goldblums’s character refers to his looking for “the next ex Mrs…”

Mammoth, titanic-threatening cubes became a thing a decade or so ago, and they are a pain in the glass–especially when too-small glasses are used.

I have a double layered/insulated espresso glass that is perfect for holding a hot double shot of espresso without singing my fingers, and keeping said espresso hot for long enough to enjoy it at my leisure. Mine is a bit taller than the one in the photo but it gives a good idea of how it looks.

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I saw an episode of ‘Places to Love’ on the Create channel yesterday, featuring Chattanooga, Tenn. At one of the bars there, ice cubes are created barside for the customer. Shown was a half dome? which is supposed to not dilute the cocktail as much as a multiside cube.
I use my silicone 6 cube tray for making stock cubes, freezing pureed chicken livers for the black cat, pesto cubes, etc.

A sphere is the least possible surface area per unit volume, so if the sphere has the same volume of water as the cube, the sphere is the best option. Spherical ice cube trays also exist, but I haven’t felt the need to buy one.

Reminds me of this: https://www.tiktok.com/@alok/video/7380471829909032198

I had a golf ball ice cube tray like 40 years ago. Impossible.

1. Don’t drop that glass! Those things practically explode into zillions of tiny nasty bits.
2. Big cubes, whether spherical of cubical, are best for maintaining the temp of liquids already cold. Dump them into something room temp and you’ll wait a long while before getting an acceptably cold drink. Small cubes, esp those weird little shapes that come out of the gadget in your icebox, chill quickly but also melt–and dilute–quickly.
3. 3. Yes, there are devices of spherical ice ‘cubes,’ but there’s a trick (which I don’t know) to using them (I’m told), and if you don’t know it the balls will split at the equator, leaving you with two domes.
4. There’s a place in Chicago (which I’ve forgotten) whose monster cubes are not molded in trays but actually SAWN out of blocks of ice. Customer apparently go crazy over them.
5. Ice has terroir just as wine does. It came from a particular Massachusetts lake (also forgotten) and was asked for by name by demanding customers, among whom was the novelist and postmaster Anthony Trollope.
6. Packed in straw as insulation, New England ice was shipped as far as India, where it cooled the fevers of the Raj. It also played a part, naturally, in the creation of one of the greatest of mixed drinks, the Gin and Tonic. The quinine-lace tonic that dosed Er Majesty’s sojers against malaria went down the more easily when enhanced with a shot of gin made it more palatable, esp when cooled with ice.
7. Imported ice was expensive and I believe that’s the reason for the lingering British parsimony with ice in mixed drinks. If they hand you a tepid martini, they probably haven’'t pegged you for a Yank.
8. Sorry to have forgotten so many details, but I haven’t had a use of excuse for this stuff in more than 15 years. But the industrious among you now have a new obsession to wrangle with.