Lake-harvested cocktail ice is an old business making a comeback in Norway
vinepair.com
vinepair.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the West it's often awful, in the more mountainous areas it's very good, in Paris and the North it's ok.
We often think, in our modern world, that water and power are free at our homes.
What's the difference between shipping 100 lbs of water then freezing it vs shipping 100 lbs of ice?
Often it's the other way around, the ice is and can be used to cool other cargo. Ship fruit or fish with it.
This is how the meatpacking plants in Chicago used to work, entire train loads of ice was shipped down, then we add beef in Chicago, then you ship refrigerated beef and ice together to the rest of the country.
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.
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.
People go to a bar for a good time. If you took the time to tell them a story about a wine, they probably had a good time hearing about that and were willing to pay to continue participating in that story.
I'm laughing that you're citing your philosophy degree and seem to have missed the boat about people searching for meaning in their life, jumping straight to cognitive biases (which aren't even a philosophical subject).
If cooled very rapidly, liquid water forms a glass e rather than crystallizing to hexagonal ice, for example, hyperquenched glassy water. [0]
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.
This feels like the ultimate hipster cocktail phenomenon.
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.
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...
That said, the virus concern is probably not invalid, so I'd get my ice cubes from somewhere with a less exciting story.
Gosh how did our ancestors survive?
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.