>“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,”<p>Most cocktails bar already have good quality ice, I do wonder How a good story taste?<p>The environmental waste of shipping ice just seems silly.
Yea I'll pass... you can make high quality ice fairly easily and you can guarantee it meets some basic cleanliness standards.<p>This feels like the ultimate hipster cocktail phenomenon.
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...
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.
It feels like any discussion about transporting ice from Norway should at least mention "the world's greatesr greatest publicity stunt" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_block_expedition_of_1959" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_block_expedition_of_1959</a>
You need to watch put in SF for this kind of thing too.<p>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.
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.
I mean.. what about algae and amoebas and such? I don't seen the appeal of naturally harvested ice. I guess if it's harvested from close by then the carbon footprint could be much lower than artificially frozen water... but the carbon footprint of ice making in general is probably low relative to other things, like driving, or air travel.