Cocktail Accessory Review: BDX Cocktail Cube

I heard about the Booker & Dax Cocktail Cube recently, and speaking as an enormous fan of everything Dave Arnold (the bar, the book, the Searzall) I knew that I had to pick one up.If you didn't click on the link, the Cocktail Cube has a great backstory, and I'll let Mr. Arnold tell it himself.

For years I scoffed at the numerous bartenders I heard wax poetic on the virtues of shaking cocktails with one big ice cube. One year in front of a large audience I ran a test intended to prove that big ice cubes were all show. I shook with different types of ice and dumped the drinks into graduated cylinders to measure the amount of foam the shaking had produced. To my surprise, and embarrassment, the large cube had a positive, repeatable effect on foam quantity. I don’t know why the big cube does a better job, it just does.

The Cocktail Cube is a 2-inch block of high density polyethylene which feels exactly like an ice cube in the shaker. Large ice cubes are a luxury, and wasting them on a shaken cocktail is not ideal, so the idea here is that you put the cube in the shaker alongside the cocktail and other ice.Obviously I couldn't just take his word on it (although honestly I definitely could, the man is a genius) so I ran a side-by-side with both a gimlet and a daiquiri with and without the Cube.The bottom line here is that all other things being equal (I made sure to keep both versions identical, down to the number of ice cubes used to shake with) the Cocktail Cube really does affect the viscosity of the drink in a good way. The drinks I shook with the Cube were both lighter-feeling (good for the citrus-based daiquiri and gimlet) and tasted better. I'll be using it in my shaken drinks from now on.