[HN Gopher] Lake-harvested cocktail ice is an old business makin...
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Lake-harvested cocktail ice is an old business making a comeback in
Norway
Author : ohjeez
Score : 30 points
Date : 2025-02-15 16:32 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (vinepair.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (vinepair.com)
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| I also have ice for my cocktails, with water from a Scandinavia
| lake. It comes from my tap.
| peterpost2 wrote:
| >"I hope that the businesses open their eyes more and more, and
| understand that it's important to have good quality of ice with a
| good story,"
|
| Most cocktails bar already have good quality ice, I do wonder How
| a good story taste?
|
| The environmental waste of shipping ice just seems silly.
| writtenAnswer wrote:
| seems more like a novelty item
| burkaman wrote:
| It's not even a good story. "You are drinking unfiltered lake
| water" is not appetizing.
| dagss wrote:
| Not disagreeing about the point of lake ice, but about
| apetizing -- as a Norwegian, I would much rather drink
| directly from a Norwegian lake in the mountains than tap
| water from any city, Norwegian or European. Much tastier.
|
| Drilling through the ice for drinking water is common (well,
| if you have a cabin near a mountain lake). Closest you would
| get in many cities is purchasing highest quality bottled
| water, except that has been stored in plastic.
| jjulius wrote:
| Not entirely comparable, but I'm someone who frequently
| backpacks in the mountain regions of the Pacific Northwest,
| and I wholeheartedly agree with this general sentiment.
| Mountain lakes and streams have the most delicious water,
| and much of it is surprisingly clean thanks to wilderness
| regulations. I still filter out of an abundance of caution,
| but often times the water is so clean that there's no
| actual need.
|
| It's absolutely tastier and purer than any water elsewhere,
| and I've even got a few "favorite" streams I prefer hahaha.
| I actively look forward to drinking from them and, even as
| I write this, crave water from them. Glacial runoff streams
| (at least the siltless ones) are the absolute best - so
| frosty and delicious.
| burkaman wrote:
| Fair enough. This is not a lake in the mountains though,
| it's right outside Oslo next to a bunch of farmland.
|
| Maybe things are different in Europe, in most of the US the
| highest quality water is from the tap. Bottled water is at
| best just repackaged tap water, and the expensive brands
| are usually just shipped from somewhere far away with worse
| standards than your local municipality.
| dagss wrote:
| With "high quality" do you refer to taste or safety?
|
| In Norway, tap water countryside can be quite tasty but
| in cities there has often been chlorine added and it just
| taste worse.
|
| And bottled water is bottled mountain water with good
| taste (in Norway), not as good as tap water countryside
| but better than tap water in cities.
|
| Most other places I have been in the world tap water
| tastes...not good. UK, France, Spain, California... I
| mean I can adapt, good water is not essential to life,
| but.. it is just something else.
|
| I am sure mountain regions in US would have excellent tap
| water though, no reason they should not have.
| seszett wrote:
| Not sure about the other countries but it's probably the
| same, in France at least tap water tastes very different
| in different places.
|
| In the West it's often awful, in the more mountainous
| areas it's very good, in Paris and the North it's ok.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| If you add up the cost of shipping the water, either in bottles
| or in pipes, and the electricity, including line losses, it
| starts to be more even I expect.
|
| We often think, in our modern world, that water and power are
| free at our homes.
| yapyap wrote:
| yeah.. no
| iancmceachern wrote:
| What many folks may not realize is that ice for drinking
| water is often made from bottled or filtered water.
|
| What's the difference between shipping 100 lbs of water
| then freezing it vs shipping 100 lbs of ice?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The energy to run the refrigerator in the truck
| lemonberry wrote:
| "I do wonder How a good story taste?"
|
| When I was a bartender if we had a wine that wasn't selling
| we'd do two things: raise the price and improve the story
| around it. The story involved researching the vineyard, the
| wine maker, and the grapes involved in the wine. Once the staff
| has the story then it's easy to sell it.
|
| People are very gullible. About a lot of things. It's
| especially comical with wine because a lot of people are
| convinced they're super tasters.
|
| Raising the price is an easy win. There's always some guy
| saying, "you get what you pay for!" as if wine were priced on
| it's taste or quality.
|
| My experience as a bartender and a bachelors in philosophy have
| given me great appreciation for cognitive biases.
| hammock wrote:
| Just give me the cheapest wine that's single-origin and not
| loaded with mega purple
| jfengel wrote:
| We pay for stories all the time. It's entertainment. Your
| beverages are also a form of entertainment.
|
| I'm OK with paying more for a wine that comes with a good
| story. It does have a different effect on me than one
| without, even if the chemical makeup is identical. I probably
| won't buy it more than once -- but I might, if the story
| resonates especially well.
| adolph wrote:
| You may think that ice is ice. I'm not going to disagree that
| Norwegian lake ice is likely the same as locally produced
| freezer ice. However, there are interesting properties to kinds
| of ice with unexplored culinary properties.
|
| _If cooled very rapidly, liquid water forms a glass e rather
| than crystallizing to hexagonal ice, for example, hyperquenched
| glassy water._ [0]
|
| 0. https://water.lsbu.ac.uk/water/amorphous_ice.html
|
| *. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_ice
| hatthew wrote:
| > environmental waste
|
| From the article:
|
| > It concluded that one could send the lake ice 286 miles by
| truck, 1,438 miles by rail, or 4,284 miles by container ship
| until it broke even with the energy required to produce a
| Clinebell block.
|
| This report was of course commissioned by the business in
| question so it is likely biased, but generally speaking it
| seems clear that shipping natural ice and freezing your own ice
| are roughly comparable in terms of environmental impact.
| sigmar wrote:
| They mention visual checks for dead animals, and bacterial tests.
| But what about checks for heavy metals? Viruses? Radioactivity?
| (My understanding is that viruses are frequently durable to
| temperature changes because, unlike bacteria, they don't have a
| cell wall that will get damaged when frozen) This seems like a
| naturalistic fallacy to assume random ice you find is safe to
| drink...
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Here[1] is what the gov't says on the topic. Mostly stay way
| from water that's near farmland and after heavy rainfall. Apart
| from that it's quite safe here.
|
| As for radioactivity, AFAIK the primary source would be radon
| from granite and similar rocks. It shouldn't be a problem for a
| lake, though can be a concern if you have a well[2].
|
| [1]: https://www.fhi.no/sm/drikkevann/rad/for-du-drikker-vann-
| ret...
|
| [2]: https://dsa.no/radon/radon-i-vann
| burkaman wrote:
| This lake is surrounded on almost all sides by farmland:
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/FyZoCWM1YwAvWcCi9
| magicalhippo wrote:
| True, however the farmland-proximity advice is primarily
| due to bacteria from natural fertilizers (ie cow dung etc),
| and those bacteria wouldn't survive freezing.
|
| That said, the virus concern is probably not invalid, so
| I'd get my ice cubes from somewhere with a less exciting
| story.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > This seems like a naturalistic fallacy to assume random ice
| you find is safe to drink
|
| Gosh how did our ancestors survive?
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| Yes. Let's haul tons of ice through the country that is
| potentially even dirty. Just so that some has more interesting
| ice in their drink.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Yea I'll pass... you can make high quality ice fairly easily and
| you can guarantee it meets some basic cleanliness standards.
|
| This feels like the ultimate hipster cocktail phenomenon.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| It really is. The basic hipsterization cycle goes like this:
|
| 1. Humans suffer with crappy situation due to lack of
| technology for years. (In this case, water-borne illnesses that
| killed most humans for our first X years as a species, where X
| is like 1925 - whenever humans first came on the scene).
|
| 2. Humans invent technology that makes life better and stop
| suffering from crappy situation entirely.
|
| 3. Hipsters think crappy situation was probably kinda awesome
| and elect to go back to it. Before 2020, anti-vaxxers were
| largely hipsters. Unpasteurized milk is a good current example
| too.
| evbogue wrote:
| Legend has it that my great great (great?) grandfather was
| heavily invested in lake ice exports from Norway to warmer
| places. Then the refrigerator was invented, he went under on his
| boat, and made the controversial decision to move to America in
| hopes of finding prosperity not long before the great depression.
| It's reassuring to see this ancient industry is coming back via
| automation.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| You need to watch put in SF for this kind of thing too.
|
| If you have a water delivery service and they deliver "live
| water" it's this. Just pond or spring water, un filtered. Thats
| why they have to refrigerate it.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Hopefully it's spring water, not pond water. Many springs are
| effectively filtered by the soil and are perfectly safe to
| drink from, but I wouldn't want to risk pond water. Lake water
| is better, ponds are just nasty though.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| If it's collected deep in the earth. A spring can also mean
| what is basically a pond. Often this water in question is
| collected from the later.
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| This ice has provenance. Makes sense since when it comes to fancy
| wines and spirits that's what you're paying for after a certain
| point.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| It feels like any discussion about transporting ice from Norway
| should at least mention "the world's greatesr greatest publicity
| stunt" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_block_expedition_of_1959
| hobos_delight wrote:
| And of course the Sydney Ice Berg
| https://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_sydney_iceberg
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Kinda cool how modern refrigeration is so good and cheap people
| can larp the old expensive in their time ways of refrigeration
| (having your drink cooled by lake ice that was cut and stored) as
| a novelty.
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