When Frederic Tudor, aka the "Ice King", started his worldwide ice delivery service in the early 19th century—sailing massive blocks of as far as Europe and India—he probably didn't realize he was launching an American obsession.

We shave it, crush it, cube it, and use finely-tuned machines to carve it into tiny pellets and cultivate 300-pound, crystal-clear blocks. We gnaw on snow cones and shaved ice, pack our soda cups to the rim, and slurp down Slushies 24-7 at the 7-11. We even take our tea and coffee on the rocks.

Now, bartenders across the land are staking their claim on ice, creating fancified cocktails where the frozen stuff takes a front seat.

"If you're talking premium liquor, you expect premium glass and ice too," says Andrew Bohrer, a longtime Seattle bartender and co-founder of the Washington State Bartender's Guild.

This thirst for "premium ice" has resulted in a boom in boutique ice delivery services and specialized gear like the greaseless chainsaws and Japanese hand saws used to carve block ice. Of course, all of this specialized machinery and hands-on ice craft comes at a cost, and that's where you, the customer, comes in. Bohrer estimates that an "ice program"—a phrase that he describes as a "terrible plague" in the bar business—adds about 60 to 80 cents to the cost of a drink. "That's a pretty expensive ingredient," he says.

Cloudy with a Chance of Whisky

As with diamonds, cocktail ice is judged by its clarity, density, size and cut, all of which add to the quality and aesthetics of the experience. As water freezes, air bubbles are trapped and eventually disperse inside the frozen mass to create a cloudy appearance. But if you slow the freezing process down, a lake effect sets in as air bubbles rise to the top or sides. The result is crystal-clear, dense ice, which is harder and colder than a typical ice cube. When you're shaking and stirring drinks behind a bar, this is the ice you want.

Bohrer was one of the first bartenders to start slicing and dicing ice in the West Coast cocktail culture. In the early aughts he attended the Cocktail World Cup in New Zealand and watched a Japanese bartender carving a block of clear ice into a sphere in a matter of minutes—a party trick that's commonplace in upscale Japanese bars. Before you could say blackberry bramble, he was back home carving up big blocks of ice with a chainsaw, and hand-carving spheres behind the bar for bemused bar patrons. When he brought his roadshow to San Francisco, it was game on at speakeasies and upscale eateries around the city. At about the same time, New York's "artisanal ice" scene was kicking into gear at Richard Boccato's Dutch Kills bar, and his affiliated Hundredweight Ice and Cocktail Services.

Nowadays, gonzo-sized cubes and spheres of ice can be found in barrooms across the country, along with the industrial-strength machines that crank them out.

Ice Cold Tech

The Clinebell Equipment Company builds a series of big-block ice machines, but the CB300X2E is its Bentley. The machine contains two 40-gallon chambers of water that are chilled from the bottom up, while pumps constantly circulate water on the top layer—a process that jettisons any bubbles and impurities from the block.

A 300 pound block of ice is hoisted out of the Clinebell machine at Half Step in Austin. Bill McCullough for WIRED

After three days of slow freezing, two giant 300-pound block of crystal-clear ice are born. At a price tag of six grand, though, very few bars have the means, much less the space to house this beast. Instead, they opt for ice delivery services, some of which will even carve up the product to order.

After the giant blocks are broken down into bar-ready chunks—be it spheres, extra-large cubes, or rectangular spears—they are used in spirit-heavy cocktails where the goal is to control and slow down dilution. An Old Fashioned, for instance, is often accompanied by an extra-large ice cube so you can taste every hint of oak and vanilla in that 10-year-old bourbon that's costing you five bucks a sip. Martinis, too, demand minimal dilution, so bartenders will stir gin and vermouth with dense cubes for several minutes to get them to the right temperature.

If you're talking premium liquor, you expect premium glass and ice too.

For smaller cubes, the industry standard is Kold-Draft ice. These machines freeze water from the top and sides of small cells and flush impurities out the bottom, churning out 1,000 pounds of dense, 1-¼-inch square cubes per day. More recently, Hoshizaki America designed a very similar machine that by most accounts is more reliable, and is slowly but surely working its way into the highfalutin cocktail scene. Yet another popular machine is called the Scotsman, which produces addictively chewy, fluffy pellet ice that absorbs flavors and is used to shake up drinks like mojitos, mint juleps, tiki drinks and smashes.

The Ice House

Ice has a special place in the heart of Texans, who have depended on "icehouses" to beat the heat and shoot the shit since the mid-19th century. It was then when railroads and mule wagons started bringing big blocks of ice into insulated storage sheds, creating ad hoc corner stores and bars across the state. So when Chris Bostick started his bar Half Step in Austin last year, the fifth-generation Texan knew he had to go big on ice.

Half Step's 500 square-foot ice room is filled with tools of the trade, including a Clinebell machine, chainsaws, hand saws, knives, chisels, and for good measure, a band saw. When Bostick talks about ice, he sounds as much like a pitmaster as a bartender. "We are slow-cooking cocktails, just like a chef stands by a stove," he explains. "It's like smoking a brisket, we're controlling the time and temperature and how the water affects the cocktail."

Chris Bostick at Half Step in Austin. Bill McCullough for WIRED

At Half Step, Clinebell ice blocks are hoisted (via an I-beam) to a work table where the staff breaks them down into six different types of cubes for the drink menu: crushed ice, shaker cubes, hand cracked ice, ice spheres, utility ice, and punch (bowl) blocks. Some drinks call for the bartender to hand-chip the ice in front of the patron, which "is all part of the theater of it," says Bostick. "People are fascinated, most of them haven't seen this before."

Beyond the aesthetics and theater, though, some bartenders are becoming amateur ice scientists in their pursuit of cocktail perfection.

Michael Lazar manages the bar at San Francisco's Hard Water, where 400 different whiskies are available for shaking and stirring. Normally, ten seconds is long enough to shake a drink, he says, but bartenders have to be in tune with the process to get it just right. "You feel how cold the tins are getting and you're listening to the what the tins sound like," he explains. "You have all these edges and you're breaking the ice quickly, so the force is a factor too."

While shaking is meant to quickly chill, aerate and dilute a drink, stirring is a more subtle science, requiring a keen sense of the spirits involved and the type of ice in play. Lazar noted that some bartenders will stir drinks for several minutes to achieve maximum chilling, which also gives the spirits a viscous, "ropey" quality. On the flip side, some bartenders take a more lax approach, and might leave your $10 martini hanging out to dry.

"I've noticed this trend in fancy places where bartenders will pour spirits over ice and walk away for a bit," says Andrew Bohrer. "What you end up with is an undiluted cocktail that is sort of chilled but not cold enough."

A bartender squeezes a lemon twist into a Fairbanks cocktail at Half Step in Austin. Bill McCullough for WIRED

Not-cold-enough drinks are never a problem at the Interval bar in San Francisco's Fort Mason Center. That's because bar manager Jennifer Colliau leaves nothing to chance in the chilling and dilution of her drinks: she trains bartenders to use thermometers to get drinks to the specific temperatures she has chosen for each recipe, at 25, 32, or 35-degrees. Some of the drinks are presented with ice frozen on a slant inside the glass ("large ice"), and others use extra-large cubes of Hoshizaki ice.

Colliau says the artisanal ice scene has hit something of a plateau, but always sees more opportunities for experimentation. "The skill as a bartender is looking at all the options available and choosing the one that makes most delicious drink; but you can't do that if you don't understand all the options," she says.

Her drink menu at Interval mirrors the cerebral, steampunk-ish design of the space, chock full of curious artifacts and tomes, Long Now Foundation prototypes, including a model of the 10,000-year "super-clock," and an animated, kaleidoscoping art piece created by Brian Eno. The drink menu offers variations on classic cocktails with some decidedly offbeat spins and twists—an old fashioned with bierbrand and pear liquer, a martini with genever and white wine.

Precious and trendy as it may seem, artisanal ice looks to be a mainstay at cocktail bars across the U.S. That is, unless our bigger-better-faster-more impulses overcome our ice fetish.

Owen Laracuente, a veteran Austin bar-hopper, recently visited Half Step and was not all-in on the ice show. "I'm always like, 'Stop playing with the damn ice and make my drink!' I'm not even joking. After two, 'Neat please.'"