That's not a knife its a spoon!

Since starting at the Merchant, ice and it's use has played a huge part of my working bartending life. We started humbly. We fumbled our way through making, storing, using and cutting it. It was a total nightmare and extremely time consuming. In Belfast we don't have the luxury of ordering in pre made blocks of ice. So every single piece of ice has been made by us for us...
We haven't changed our methods that much in five years. We freeze tap water, yes pure tap water in large plastic containers and place them into chest freezers. Its takes two to three days for the water to freeze into a solid block. We then remove the frozen block and let it defrost awhile. Once the ice block has defrosted a little we removed it from its plastic container. We set to work with an ice pick, we collect all the clear ice discarding the ice that is cloudy(mineral and dust sediment). It's that easy folks, really it is that simple. Here is me with a chinese meat cleaver cutting ice in the wonderful merchant hotel.