The El Cerdo

You Need Smoked Ice in Your Life and This Cocktail is a Good Place to Start

Smoked cocktails are all the rage, and for good reason. They are delicious. The smoke, generally added by an infuser, add flavor and complexity to your cocktail. It’s also a bit of a process.

Making smoked ice is also a somewhat of a process, but it’s one that can be undertaken in advance. Think of it like meal prepping, except for your drinks.

To make smoked ice, here’s what you do. Get a baking dish—an aluminum tray works perfectly—fill it with purified water, put it in your smoker, and leave it there for an hour or two. If you’re smoking meat at the same time, put the water above the meat. Once it’s done, it will take on a golden hue and look something like this.

Next, let it cool, strain it through some cheese cloth into a bottle, and pour it into your ice block tray. Then freeze it and you’re done.

From there, all you have to do is open your freezer, remove a cube, and put it in your drink. You can do a traditional Old Fashioned or Manhattan, but you can also get creative and think outside the block, umm, box. That’s where I went after being lubricated with an Old Fashioned, which was delicious, but not exactly what I wanted out of my smoked ice.

As I’ve been getting into tequila to try to arm myself before that becomes the next thing, I decided to try an Old Fashioned with Una Familia, a reposado aged in Jack Daniels barrels. For reasons I can’t really explain, though the first cocktail gets us in that direction, I decided to make a tequila Old Fashioned, but with chocolate bitters. Maybe I was thinking mole. Maybe it was divine inspiration. Most likely, it was just luck.

I muddled a brown sugar cube with a healthy amount of chocolate bitters, added the Una Familia, and stirred. Then I added a smoked ice cube and stirred some more. As you’re looking for the ice to add flavor, you don’t want to go the traditional route and shake your cocktail separately before pouring it over a fresh cube. You want to get that smoked cube melting.

The results were delicious. It’s definitely a cocktail I will make again. It’s also one I encourage you to make. And after you’ve had one, let your creative juices take you where they will. Then head to the comments and tell us what you made so we can try it. Cocktails, and inspiration, are best shared with others, after all.