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Jeffrey Morgenthaler‘s new experiment - mostly correct...

After quite some time, Jeffrey Morgenthaler posted an interesting article. 

It is all about size and cloudy vs. clear ice cubes. But Jeffrey didn’t completely nailed it. And there is even more of a problem, because his article might put some bartenders on the wrong path. Why? Well he compared smaller ice cubes vs. a slightly bigger ice cube versus super clear ice cubes.

Please read the article...

Now here are the fallacies and ”quasi-fallacies”:

- Biggest fallacy is, that he referred to the difference of the melted water to the original temperature. That is total nonsense. The energy which is needed to raise the temperature of ice is negligible to the energy which is needed to melt ice. This means 4° difference is impossible to make any reasonable difference in melted water!

- Jeffrey is also referring to the cloudiness to air bubbles in the ice - which is not necessarily completely wrong (air can be frozen into ice, if not frozen one-directional) - but most of the cloudiness comes from the refraction of light as a ice cube which is frozen the traditional way is breaking in itself (ice is expanding - but as the outside is freezing before the inside, it will result into fractures in the ice).

Does it make a difference? Not necessarily. But especially the first point could lead people to think, that the size and shape of ice cubes doesn’t matter a lot - but while this might be true for ice cubes out of the freezer, it is not applicable for ice cubes which are at their normal state- at 0°C.

Because dilution is also highly influenced by surface water of the cube - and here it matters: shape and size of the ice cube.

The big super clear ice cube had one more advantage against Jeffreys favorite cube: it was taller and was not fully submerged. Melting depends also on the medium (liquid vs. air).


 

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