Camper English has, let’s just say, strong feelings about ice.
“There’s not a huge difference between clear and cloudy ice in taste or melting speed,” he says. “But aesthetically, it’s a gargantuan difference between ugly, cloudy, garbage ice and slick-and-glossy, diamond-style clear ice. You can eat filet mignon out of a ditch, or you can eat it off a plate at a fine-dining restaurant.”
English, a cocktail writer from San Francisco, was once a consumer of “garbage ice” — those home freezer tray cubes with fuzzy-white nebulae. But in 2009, he devised a homegrown technique to make ice as clear as a Siberian lake in winter. He basically employed an Igloo cooler to “directionally freeze” ice from the top down and force air bubbles and minerals to the bottom, where they are cut or poured off. English now travels the planet giving talks about ice and has an army of ice nerds on Instagram trying to top one another with spectacular frozen delights.
