Bar Necessities
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Ice

Ice, the ingredient that does its work and disappears.

Ice is used in every cold drink, doing two jobs — chilling it and watering it down to get the drink to the right potency. In roughly half of the catalog it’s strained away; in the other half it stays (in a few different forms).

Where the ice ends up 255 drinks
  1. Strained off 110 43%
  2. Big cube 37 15%
  3. Filled to the top 82 32%
  4. Crushed 16 6%
  5. Served hot 10 4%

The bars aren’t ranked by size. The three that keep the ice — big cube, filled, crushed — are ordered by how fast it melts, a big cube diluting slowest and crushed fastest, so the chart runs the way the sections below do: the ice you strain off, those three forms, then the few served hot with no ice.

Every cold drink is made with ice. The chart above shows whether it’s still there when you start to drink. The ice is doing two things at once: dropping the temperature and adding water. Most drinks need that chill and the water — the key question is what happens to the ice afterward: sometimes it’s strained away, and other times it’s left in the glass.

110 drinks

The ice you don’t keep

chill, then strain

Most stirred and shaken drinks are made with ice and served without it. You chill them in a shaker or a mixing glass for fifteen to thirty seconds — long enough to drop the temperature and melt in a little water — then strain the drink into a chilled glass. The ice did its work and gets left behind: the Daiquiri gets shaken, the Dry Martini and Manhattan get stirred.

37 drinks

The big cube

slow, and spirit-forward

For a spirit-forward drink that you sip slowly over ice — think the Old Fashioned, the Negroni, the Boulevardier — one large cube beats a handful of small ones. Less surface area means the ice melts slower, so the drink stays cold without watering down too fast. Big ice cubes are the cheapest upgrade you can make to a home bar: a large-cube mold instantly elevates these drinks.

82 drinks

Filled to the top

tall, cold, and bubbly

A tall drink needs a full glass of ice — the Gin & Tonic, the Tom Collins. It might seem backwards, but more ice melts more slowly: a glass packed to the rim with ice will stay colder and dilute less than a few lonely cubes swimming in a warming drink. Fill it up, and it keeps the bubbles lively and the drink cold to the last sip.

16 drinks

Crushed

frosty on purpose

Crushed ice is a different tool entirely: maximum surface, instant chill, and frost that clings to the outside of the glass. It waters a drink down quickly — exactly what you want for a Mint Julep, a Mai Tai, and most of the tiki catalog. You don’t need any special equipment — a canvas Lewis bag and a mallet let you easily make crushed ice by hand.

Ice is the ingredient you add to almost every drink and measure in none of them. Whether it stays, and in what shape, is the last thing the drink decides for you.

Browse all 255

More in the reading room — short pieces on how cocktails work.

Sources. That melting ice is part of a drink’s recipe — and that a bigger cube dilutes slower while crushed ice dilutes fast — is standard bar practice; see Difford’s Guide and the IBA. The counts are computed live from this catalog’s own glassware and instruction fields across all 255 drinks, and each drink lands in exactly one bucket. Where the ice ends up is grouped by the serving glass, so a few served-neat drinks in a rocks glass (the Sazerac) read here as “big cube,” and the couple of tiki drinks that flash-blend crushed ice and strain up read as “strained off.”