Michel Dozois is pinning the success of his two-year old company on the dubious thrills of watching ice melt.
When courting new clients, Dozois, the owner of Los Angeles's Névé Luxury Ice Company, sits them down for a simple experiment. He fills two Old Fashioned glasses with ice—the first with conventional cubes, the second with his company's "ice rock," a single large cube, which takes up about 50 percent of the glass—and tops them with a dram of good whisky (his spirit of choice is Laphroig). Dozois then asks the potential clients to sit back and wait, allowing nature to take its course.
About every seven minutes, he asks the client to take a sip—first of the conventional drink where the ice is rapidly melting, then of the drink made with the sturdy opaque brick of Névé ice. The second shows minimal dilution; it's essentially whisky served neat, but much, much colder.
"Every cocktail calls for different dilution, different ice, different needs," Dozois explains.
But Dozois's pitch isn't only about taste. He insists that less dilution also benefits a bar's bottom-line. "If your body can take this much fluid," explains Dozois, gesturing to several glasses, "How much of that do you want to be water? If it dilutes less, it will take you less time to drink what's in the glass, and the bar will make more sales."
Originally Posted by jumperstop
