Bologna: presentation of Icy Drink, the ice glass that makes glamour all cocktails

Icydrink presented at Nu Lounge, Via dei Musei, Bologna

A whisky on the rocks or a Martini with ice? Outdated stuff, of past century, difficult to survive in the 3rd millennium. Not so much for the fermenters in question – scotch and vermouth are still the most requested on the market – as for ice cubes and crushed ice, ingredients often essential to chill a drink but as slowly as inexorably, melting, turn any drink into water.

Nowadays all this can start at a well-deserved retreat thanks to the creation, which revolutionizes the panorama of happy hours, aperitifs, cocktails etc.: Icy Drink, an innovative cup of pure ice laid on special spiral crystal supports of an exclusive design conceived to collect ice melting water in a hollow cone.

Produced by Reale srl, Icy Drink was designed by the Italian of Bologna, Mario Montanari, who invent the ice-glass maker, a patented product for the manufacture of ice cups pressed at very low temperature. It is not only a viable alternative to ice cubes to sip a cocktail or a beverage, but also for tasting cold dishes such as raw fish, caviar, and shrimp cocktail, as well as gazpacho, vichyssoise, finger foods, sorbets, fruit salads, and ice creams.

This great invention has been presented a few weeks ago in Bologna in one of the temples of the glamorous aperitifs, the Nu Lounge – a well-known and in fashion venue in Via dei Musei, below the historic setting of the old “Dead Arcade”, where the famous barman Daniele Dalla Pola, newly triumphant at the World Championships “42Below Cocktail World Cup” held in New Zealand, officialized the event.

Just Elisir d’Amore filled the newly Icy Drink glasses, a cocktail of Dalla Pola helping him to climb the world barmen’s throne: vodka flavored with pineapple and Sichuan pepper, scented cane sugar syrup with peel orange and lemon and ginger, precious French red fruit liqueur, lavender vodka, centrifuged and filtered pineapple juice, a tip of limoncello and one of Branca Fernet, all steamed with lavender aromatic water and decorated with a sprig of lavender.

A joyful atmosphere cheered by pretty top-models, and many other original cocktails created by the barman Dalla Pola, imaginative inventions based on cucumber sorbet, ginger beer or vodka with Provence roses, to celebrate the event of a new Era in the World of cocktails: no longer with ice or on ice but directly inside the ice.

article written by Gabriele Orsi and taken from the Mondo del Gusto (World of Taste) website – http://www.mondodelgusto.it/2011/07/04/bologna-presentato-icy-drink-calice-ghiaccio-che-rende-glamour-cocktails/