America is stricken with persistent malaise, if not terminal decline. Wages and savings are flat, seas and temperatures are rising, and political acrimony is choking humanity like a splinter of chicken bone wedged in a pound mutt's bronchi. And these "hipster ice cubes" are just too goddamned big.
Despite humanity's recent confirmation of the law of entropy, there is still one activity that inspires our bright-eyed inner pioneers to birth new bourgeois advances. There is, you see, a "cocktail renaissance" on, and Mother Jones notices that this lively spirit of disruption has spread to frozen water:
If you want to understand the latest trend in craft cocktails, you could do worse than to listen to Outkast. What's cooler than being cool is indeed ice cold. Specifically, it's stored at minus-2 degrees, sculpted with a Japanese band saw, and retails for $1 a cube.
Yes, artisanal ice is now a thing. In hipster meccas from Portland to Williamsburg, bars are serving up their drinks on extra-dense, extra-clear cubes, produced through a laborious process of freezing and carving. Cocktail connoisseurs swear the difference in flavor is worth the extra effort: In addition to being more aesthetically pleasing, the cubes' density and relatively large size mean they melt more slowly and dilute your drink less. But there's evidence that the fancy ice might not be the coolest thing ever to happen to the environment.
What could be less cool than those puns? Ice cubes the size of your hand. Of course they suck for the environment, because it takes a lot of energy to freeze a larger mass. And don't even think of making them at home in your already too-cold freezer, because "though it's possible to create them with silicon molds, 'the result will still be a cloudy ice product. It's just not that appealing in drinks,'" says a guy who will hand-cut fancy ice chunks for your oh-so-interesting Bulleit rye.
But humanity is probably already too far gone to save by opting for smaller ice cubes. It's really about you. And you shouldn't want ice cubes this big. Why would you want such things?
They can't be swirled. They can't be swizzled. You can't run them around in your mouth. If you're out and about and you are served a tiny drink with a little alcohol and a fucking Jeroboam Gibraltar chunk of solid chilly, and someone comes up to talk to you, you will have no fallback, no alternative to looking them in the eye and engaging them, empty mouthed, in stultifying unwelcome conversation while your hand grows colder and darker than a sherpa's trying to massage breath out of an unconscious trust-funder in a squall on K2.
It's not hipster. It's not artisanal. It's inconvenient water. Go with ice chips. Dilutes your drink too much? Stay home. Life is brief and uncertain. Don't muck it up with big ice.