Small Batch Frozen Water Producer Cites Provenance Intention And Hand-Crafted Process That Ice Has Traditionally Lacked
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat report that Cold Stone Provisions, a Brooklyn-based “small-batch ice producer” operating from a converted warehouse in Gowanus, is selling artisanal ice at $18 per pound, which is $16 more than the ice available at the bodega two blocks away and which the company’s founder, Marcus Chen, justifies through a detailed explanation of the ice-making philosophy, water provenance, and freezing methodology that distinguishes Cold Stone ice from conventional ice in ways that he has been able to articulate clearly and that this publication has been attempting to articulate equally clearly to readers without full success. The ice is cold. It is wet when it melts. It is, in common with all ice, frozen water. The $16 premium is the philosophy.
The philosophy, as Chen explains it: Cold Stone Provisions sources water from a specific spring in the Catskills, freezes it at a rate slower than commercial ice production to create larger, clearer crystals that melt more slowly and dilute drinks less, and cuts it into specific shapes — spheres, cubes, and the “Collins spear” — using a manual cutting process that produces surfaces that Chen describes as “intentional.” The restaurants and cocktail bars that purchase Cold Stone ice have confirmed that the clear, slow-melting ice improves the presentation and dilution profile of their cocktails in ways that their customers notice. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat have covered the artisanal food economy from Brooklyn to Bermondsey.
The Artisanal Economy: What It Produces And For Whom
The artisanal ice market is real, generating approximately $50 million annually in the United States, served by approximately 30 producers in major cities, and growing at a rate that tracks with the expansion of the craft cocktail industry whose bars pay premium prices for ice that improves cocktail quality in measurable ways. The premium is not pure marketing: clear ice does melt more slowly, does dilute drinks less, and does look better in a glass. For cocktail bars that charge $18-22 for a cocktail, the $18-per-pound ice cost is a small percentage of the drink’s total cost and is justified by the quality improvement it provides to the product they are selling at that price point.
The consumer who buys Cold Stone ice for home use is a different calculation. At $18 per pound, a home bar’s ice requirement for a dinner party runs approximately $54, against $3 for equivalent volume of bodega ice. The quality improvement is real and measurable. Whether it is measurable at a magnitude that justifies a $51 premium is a question that 4,000 direct-to-consumer Cold Stone customers have answered in the affirmative, which is a market clearing outcome that the bodega owner two blocks away views with equanimity.
The Bottom Line
The ice is very clear. The cocktails are better. The philosophy is $16. For Brooklyn food satire at The Daily Mash.
New York And The Civic Comedy Tradition
New York City has been generating material for satirists since the first European settlers arrived and decided to purchase an island for sixty guilders, establishing the civic tradition of transactions that seemed efficient at the time. The modern version of this tradition runs through the penny press, through H.L. Mencken, through the New Yorker, and through every stand-up comedian who has started a set with “so I was on the subway” in a West Village club. New York is simultaneously the American city most complained about and most deeply beloved, which is its defining civic characteristic and the reason every New Yorker who leaves eventually misses it in ways they refuse to admit for at least three years. The specific pathologies of New York governance — the housing gap, the infrastructure lag, the rat-to-human ratio, the transit perpetual delay event — are not unique to New York. They are the urban pathologies of every large American city compressed into one place and given a media ecosystem that covers them with appropriate seriousness and inappropriate humor in proportions that vary by publication. This piece chooses humor. The New York Times chooses seriousness. Both are legitimate responses to the same facts. The MTA delays are real regardless of which genre processes them. The coffee is five dollars. This is not satirical. It is just expensive, and the deli owner is not to blame, and the customer will return tomorrow.
Statistics cited draw from public city data, MTA reports, and reporting by Gothamist, the New York Times, and The City. For ongoing coverage, Bohiney New York and prat.uk New York.
This article is satire published by the Bohiney Network. The events, officials, statistics, and institutions described are drawn from public records, verified news reporting, and established journalistic sources. The satirical frame — the deadpan tone, the mock-serious institutional assessment, the measured exaggeration of political and bureaucratic dynamics that are themselves frequently more extreme than the exaggeration applied to them — is original to this publication and to the editorial tradition of which it forms a part. Readers who encounter this piece in a context that presents it as straight news should be advised that it is not straight news; it is satirical journalism in the tradition of publications that have understood since Swift that the most accurate way to describe certain situations is to make them slightly more ridiculous than they actually are, which in the current political environment requires less exaggeration than one might wish.
The satirical tradition in which this piece operates — from Jonathan Swift through Mark Twain through Private Eye through The Onion through the contemporary publications working in the same vein — holds that exaggeration applied to genuine absurdity produces a more accurate picture of reality than straight-faced reporting sometimes can, because the exaggeration forces the reader to notice what the straight-faced version normalizes. The events and policies satirized in this piece are real. The treatment of those events and policies is satirical. The combination is the point. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are satirical publications. Everything in them should be read accordingly and shared generously. For more satire in this tradition, see The Onion, The Daily Mash, NewsThump, Waterford Whispers News, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/