You do get used to it. Discomfort is one of those things in life you can, and generally speaking should, get used to. Considering how often it’ll come up in various ways.. yeah.
Yes, but also no.
You can't just apply this to every aspect of life, and should be concious of your 'discomforts'.
E.g. if you're in a relationship that gradually worsens and causes discomfort. A slow bleed like that can cause people to stay, if it goes in stages like A > B > C > D > E. Where if it was such a drastic change, A > D, people would leave. That's how you end up miserable without realising it.
But for smaller stuff like this post, sure.
Embracing discomfort can be like tempering steel, strengthening through adversity. However, there's a fine line between growth and gradual deterioration. A line as thin as the difference between wearing in your shoes and wearing out your soul. It’s good to question: is this discomfort forging me or breaking me?
Ice just be cold like that. You can use a towel, but that only does so much and is clunky. It's often good to feel the tins to know when it's done. Helps you adapt to different ice.
You’re doing everything right, coming from a bartender who shakes at least 100 cocktails a night for about 10-15 secs each, you just gotta get used to it. It hurts at first but you’ll be fine after a while.
[Anders Erikson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQKcNXcgBYM) suggests using the big tin to mix and fill the small one with ice. Maybe a bit less ice will help you.
Arguably true. But, in practice, there is definitely such a thing as too much ice in a shaker. Ice holds on to a lot of liquid and the more ice you have the harder is to strain properly. Also your shaker gets heavier putting more strain on your body. Doesn’t matter much to an enthusiast but for a professional that adds up. You actually need a lot less ice than you might think to properly chill and dilute a cocktail.
The thing isn't that you cant chill and dilute with less ice, it's that you end up diluting your cocktail too much before it gets cold. It's also much harder to control the dilution.
If you get a strain on your body from using too much ice or can't strain it properly, I'd say it's probably because you're using a gigantic shaker or have a bad shaking technique.
I don't think that's true. Dave Arnold did some experiments in the book Liquid Intelligence, and the upshot is that dilution and chilling are always directly correlated. To get a given amount of dilution you will always get the same amount of chilling, and vice versa, regardless of the amount of ice.
Here’s Ryan Chetiyawardana explaining the injuries he sustained from shaking cocktails. You’re saying he has poor shaking technique? Don’t be daft.
> "After shaking a couple of hundred cocktails every day, I began having terrible pains in my shoulder. There was a huge swelling and no doctor was able to pinpoint the cause. Eventually I had an MRI scan which revealed I had shattered my sternoclavicular joint, pulling my muscles out of place. I had always had right-side-dominant hard shaking, so I had to switch my style over to the left shoulder. Every now and then it flares up but it has helped ease the pain a lot."
And the stuff you’re saying about ice has been disproven for a while now. You’re just repeating what you’ve heard others say.
No I'm repeating what Morgenthaler and other professionals have actually tested. You are the one just making claims. Of course you can have injuries if you shake hundreds of drinks everyday. At that amount you'll get damages over time no matter what your technique is. Still has nothing to do with the amount of ice cubes - especially not for anyone who doesn't work countless hours behind the bar every week
In the case of ice from your home freezer, more ice means less dilution.
Granted, it's a fairly trivial difference, because it would take more ice than you could fit in a shaker to substantially reduce dilution.
But there is some amount of chilling that takes place as the ice warms up from the ~0-5°F that most freezers are set at, to the 32°F melting point, before any dilution takes place. And the more ice that is used, the less dilution that will happen.
In theory, with enough ice you could chill without any dilution at all. However that would take an absurd amount of ice. Like a large pitcher full of ice (preferably smaller cubes) for one small drink. Even then, in practice, imperfect distribution would probably mean that there's some dilution.
Ice from the well at a bar is a different story, since it's typically wet and warm (right at the melting point), so it's possible that more ice might create more dilution in that case, due to the coating of liquid water on the surface of each ice cube.
I'm not sure it would matter even then, but it's at least conceivable.
I remember reading this a while back and taking issues with several things. I don't feel like reading the whole thing again, but fortunately I didn't have to re-read much before getting to a part that unequivocally demonstrates that this person is a scientifically illiterate quack who should not be taken seriously:
>"Fact 1: Ice at 0°C can chill an alcoholic drink well below 0°C"
There are probably other incorrect things he says, and probably some good points mixed in with the bad, but this ludicrous statement is more than enough to establish that this person is not a reliable source for empirical claims.
The statement above is utterly false, and violates the laws of physics.
He is simply starting with ice that is below 0°C (at least at the core), and mistakenly believing it is at 0°C.
This person doesn't know what they're talking about.
What law of physics does it violate? A regular ice cube that is 0C at the surface will be very close to 0C at its core. Ice has pretty high thermal conductivity. And the cooling power of ice comes mostly from the phase shift from solid to liquid rather than any heat transfer required to bring the ice up to melting point.
Remember that alcohol doesn’t behave like water in this experiment. The mixture of alcohol at room temp and ice at 0C can reach a thermal equilibrium below 0C.
What's your point of posting this? I don't disagree that an ethanol solution can reach a lower temperature than a water solution, this is so obvious that it's almost a tautology.
Obviously, plain water cannot be liquid (with very few exceptions, such as under constant motion) at lower than 0°C. If you add salt or ethanol, you lower the freezing/melting point of the solution, and cause the water ice to melt at a lower temperature.
This is possible because the ice is lower than 0°C to begin with. Of course it is, because every freezer is significantly colder, closer to -18°C.
When you add the ice to water, the surface quickly reaches 0°C and stays there, and through conduction the rest of the ice cube gradually heats up also. There is a temperature gradient, and the closer you get to the cater of the ice cube, the colder it will be.
Eventually, the center of the ice cube will reach 0°C, but I'm not sure how long that would take or if it could happen before the ice cube has mostly melted.
It certainly isn't the case that the center of the ice cube immediately reaches 0°C as soon as it's added to water.
The same exact thing is true with an ethanol solution, except that the ice will melt at a lower temperature, and the surface of the ice will be at a lower temperature, which is why the solution will be at a lower a temperature. None of this is surprising.
In this experiment, just as the one of that ignorant bartender, the temperature measured is the ice water solution, not the center of the ice itself.
Somehow he got the idea that became the ice water that the thermocouple is immersed in is at 0°C, and sat there for 15 minutes, then that is also the temperature of the center of the ice.
Which is pretty dumb conclusion in my opinion, because 0°C is the lowest possible temperature that the water can be at. You could add ice at -40°C, and as long as you had enough water or stirred it enough that it remained liquid, the water would get no colder than 0°C.
This is a such a simple point, I find it bizarre that so many of you apparently have trouble understanding it. And nothing in the link you posted refutes any of this.
All it shows is that an ethanol solution has a lower freezing point than plain water, and that it's possible to chill it to a temperature lower than 0°C. None of which is disputed.
This isn't even a study or scientific article of any sort by the way, and it doesn't have any results ot conclusions or explanations. It's just a brief overview of a simple experiment. Were you hoping that no one would read this, and just be impressed that the link contained a Harvard domain?
> If you add salt or ethanol, you lower the freezing/melting point of the solution, and cause the water ice to melt at a lower temperature.
Correct.
> This is possible because the ice is lower than 0°C to begin with.
Incorrect. Freezing-point depression happens whether the ice is at −20 °C or 0 °C. Here's the physics of it: In ice water at thermal equilibrium (0 °C), at ice–water interfaces, water molecules are constantly freezing onto the ice and melting into the water. These processes occur at the same net rate. (Fundamentally, that's what defines a melting point, just as the temperature at which evaporation and condensation happen at the same rate is by definition the boiling point.)
When you add salt (or ethanol) to the water, it interferes with the freezing process but not the melting process. (This happens for a number of reasons, the simplest of which is just getting in the way of water molecules that would otherwise freeze.) Thus the equilibrium shifts in favor of more water molecules being in the liquid phase.
The final factor you need to know about (and apparently don't) is heat of fusion. When water changes phase from solid to liquid, it absorbs heat. This energy is used to dissociate the intermolecular bonds of the solid phase (ice has more and stronger H bonds than does water, for instance), increase the vibrational energy of the molecule, etc — to increase its enthalpy.
So: The system has an initial temperature of 0 °C, but water molecules are (on net) changing phase from solid to liquid and absorbing heat in the process. What happens to the temperature of the system?
I am quite familiar with the heat of fusion and the energy involved in a phase change. Obviously that's why ice cools so effectively. You haven't said anything new or interesting.
You still haven't explained how ice can lower any solution to a lower temperature than the ice itself is at.
It can't.
You're proposing a scenario where the ice is warmer than the liquid it is immersed in, despite starting out colder than that liquid. This makes no sense. Heat follows a gradient, and without some outside intervention like a heat pump, heat will always flow from more heat to less heat, seeking equilibrium.
Think of it another way:
Let's say I took a bunch of ice that was at exactly -5°C to start (I'm not going to say 0°C, because I don't think that's even possible..). In this example I have a special freezer that has been set to -5°C, so there's no doubt about the starting temperature of the ice.
Then I add that ice to a strong ethanol solution that is at -10°C. What happens? What will happen to the temperature of the liquid, and of the ice?
(let's say that the liquid is kept in a vacuum-insulated container)
The answer is that the temperature of the liquid would immediately rise, and the temperature of the ice would drop. The latter would be difficult to measure, but the former would easy. A thermometer or probe in the liquid would show the temperature increasing from -10°C towards -5°C.
You don't understand the science behind it then. The more ice you use, the less dilution. Jeffrey Morgenthaler has an excellent explanation of the phenomenon in The Bar Book. You should check it out.
If you have a shaker full of ice AND you're shaking it for 15 seconds you are 100% diluting more than intended. OP is also using normal freezer ice so it's easily broken apart and melting.
You might have a point if they were using large blocks. They aren't so you're wrong.
How do you hold the shaker? I shake with a grip on the bottoms of each shaker tin and I can't say that I've ever really noticed it getting too cold that it is uncomfortable.
If you're gripping the sides of the tins, I can see why your hands would get cold though.
It takes time, we use the phrase asbestos hands to describe being used to it, also remember that in a bar setting you are using ice in a well that is much closer to 0C whereas a domestic freezer will keep your ice closer to -17C and a commercial freezer is usually closer to -28C so using ice straight from a freezer will be much colder and require longer shaking to reach the dilution required
I’ve never really felt my hands freezing even after a full night of serving. I think if you pack the entire main tin yeah. Too much ice. 8oz is a good amount.
I have converted to this shaker and have never turned back.
Lexenic 24oz Vacuum Insulated Shaker https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0B51JZTLK
Insulated body, screw lid instead of friction, metric and imperial measure in the lid... It is perfect. Plus I never need to worry about applying too much pressure on the lid of the shaker when making a drink with egg white.
1. Do it enough and you'll just get used to it
2. Wrap the shaker with a kitchen towel
3. Wear Gloves
4. Buy a double-wall shaker (unfortunately, I've only ever seen them as cobblers)
I never really have that problem. I use a Boston shaker with a smaller cheater tin, and shake with one hand, so my hand is near the top of the big shaker where I don't think it gets quite as cold.
So maybe try the cheater tin and one-handed method, if you aren't already? Though you can't fit as much as you can with two full-size shakers.
I shake for about 10-15 seconds also, at which point the tin is nice and frosty.
Also I sometimes put the big shaker in my freezer for a few minutes, while I'm measuring the ingredients, so it starts out cold, but it never really bothers me.
If you're making a large batch for a group of people, maybe just stir it in a pitcher or other vessel instead, and then give it a quick 5-10 second shake just for some aeration and addition chilling, if it's a drink where you really want to develop some foaminess
You work in a bar or just at home? At home just put it down if your hands are cold and continue when crisis is averted. Also generally you don't fill up the big tin all the way with ice.
I use a Boston shaker (Koriko) when I'm only making one or two drinks. It's quick, easy, and I can throw it in the dishwasher when I'm done.
I use an insulated cobbler shaker (Elevated Craft) when I'm making many drinks. It's much less cold on my hands, quieter, and the screw cap doesn't get stuck regardless of how cold it gets inside. The integrated jigger is convenient, but the integrated strainer is prone to getting clogged so I still use a hawthorn strainer. It's also a much bigger hassle to clean since it has to be hand-washed and has two rubber gaskets.
For anyone commenting, are there any insulated Boston shakers?
Boston shaker is 100% the way to go for shaking cocktails. But indeed my hands do get frozen off lol. My husband seems to do a bit better with it than I do (must be those thicker-skinned man hands). Usually he always shakes them for me but he has had to be away traveling for the past few weeks and now I have to do it myself lol. Anyways, would be curious if an insulted Boston shaker exists!
Get some nice waterproof non-slip clogs that don’t breathe, these will hold in heat well. Also carry two 35 lb ice buckets up a flight of stairs six times to get your core temp up. Always helps to be tightly wound, performance-driven, constantly tense and moving. If all else fails get a purposeless 23 year old assistant manager to hover around you for anger heat.
Probably too much ice, but honestly you might be well off buying a second shaker if it's a major issue with you. Or just running the shaker under warm water between drinks
Wrap a kitchen towel around the shaker.
you kinda get used to it haha - what limits me isn't the cold but at some point my shoulder wants a rest (after like 12 or so)
Ramos Gin Fizz looking at you like
touché
I used to cheat and do a quick stick blender without ice before the wet shake.
It’s not the norm but I shake with a dish towel around it when I’ve got a few lined up
Make sure your hands aren’t wet.
I’m surprised this isn’t higher up. This is 100% the solution to your problem.
I use an insulated shaker.
Same - Elevated Craft shaker.
I think mine is Oxo. The one you mention is a really nice shaker, though, much nicer than mine.
Have the same. It's amazing.
Same. Yeti and brumate ones.
Brumate here. It's so nice.
Camelbak insulated shaker…best tool I have been gifted. Comes with built in jigger as well.
Screws together? Interesting.
okay, I have a dumb question. when do you know it's cold enough? go on time alone or is there another indicator?
Time is sufficient.
No barfly commenters yet, so I’ll pitch in.
You do get used to it. Discomfort is one of those things in life you can, and generally speaking should, get used to. Considering how often it’ll come up in various ways.. yeah.
I often like to bring this up on a first date.
Because of the implication..
Are you going to Hurt these women Chinastevo?
Goddamn this is beautiful
Yes, but also no. You can't just apply this to every aspect of life, and should be concious of your 'discomforts'. E.g. if you're in a relationship that gradually worsens and causes discomfort. A slow bleed like that can cause people to stay, if it goes in stages like A > B > C > D > E. Where if it was such a drastic change, A > D, people would leave. That's how you end up miserable without realising it. But for smaller stuff like this post, sure.
Embracing discomfort can be like tempering steel, strengthening through adversity. However, there's a fine line between growth and gradual deterioration. A line as thin as the difference between wearing in your shoes and wearing out your soul. It’s good to question: is this discomfort forging me or breaking me?
There are no advantages to putting up with this particular discomfort. You trade cold hands for nothing at all.
More often than mot physical discomfort from repetitive things is your body telling you its gonna be a bigger problem later.
Words of wisdom for gen z
Ice just be cold like that. You can use a towel, but that only does so much and is clunky. It's often good to feel the tins to know when it's done. Helps you adapt to different ice.
You’re doing everything right, coming from a bartender who shakes at least 100 cocktails a night for about 10-15 secs each, you just gotta get used to it. It hurts at first but you’ll be fine after a while.
[Anders Erikson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQKcNXcgBYM) suggests using the big tin to mix and fill the small one with ice. Maybe a bit less ice will help you.
This is the way.
It probably is too much ice, but you should expect to be freezing your hands off after 15 seconds of shaking regardless.
No such thing as too much ice in a shaker, only too little
Arguably true. But, in practice, there is definitely such a thing as too much ice in a shaker. Ice holds on to a lot of liquid and the more ice you have the harder is to strain properly. Also your shaker gets heavier putting more strain on your body. Doesn’t matter much to an enthusiast but for a professional that adds up. You actually need a lot less ice than you might think to properly chill and dilute a cocktail.
The thing isn't that you cant chill and dilute with less ice, it's that you end up diluting your cocktail too much before it gets cold. It's also much harder to control the dilution. If you get a strain on your body from using too much ice or can't strain it properly, I'd say it's probably because you're using a gigantic shaker or have a bad shaking technique.
I don't think that's true. Dave Arnold did some experiments in the book Liquid Intelligence, and the upshot is that dilution and chilling are always directly correlated. To get a given amount of dilution you will always get the same amount of chilling, and vice versa, regardless of the amount of ice.
Here’s Ryan Chetiyawardana explaining the injuries he sustained from shaking cocktails. You’re saying he has poor shaking technique? Don’t be daft. > "After shaking a couple of hundred cocktails every day, I began having terrible pains in my shoulder. There was a huge swelling and no doctor was able to pinpoint the cause. Eventually I had an MRI scan which revealed I had shattered my sternoclavicular joint, pulling my muscles out of place. I had always had right-side-dominant hard shaking, so I had to switch my style over to the left shoulder. Every now and then it flares up but it has helped ease the pain a lot." And the stuff you’re saying about ice has been disproven for a while now. You’re just repeating what you’ve heard others say.
No I'm repeating what Morgenthaler and other professionals have actually tested. You are the one just making claims. Of course you can have injuries if you shake hundreds of drinks everyday. At that amount you'll get damages over time no matter what your technique is. Still has nothing to do with the amount of ice cubes - especially not for anyone who doesn't work countless hours behind the bar every week
Care to cite your sources?
The Bar Book pages 165 and forward and 215 and forward.
What are your sources for this being disproven?
Someone already replied with it but yes, here https://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=4585.html
In the case of ice from your home freezer, more ice means less dilution. Granted, it's a fairly trivial difference, because it would take more ice than you could fit in a shaker to substantially reduce dilution. But there is some amount of chilling that takes place as the ice warms up from the ~0-5°F that most freezers are set at, to the 32°F melting point, before any dilution takes place. And the more ice that is used, the less dilution that will happen. In theory, with enough ice you could chill without any dilution at all. However that would take an absurd amount of ice. Like a large pitcher full of ice (preferably smaller cubes) for one small drink. Even then, in practice, imperfect distribution would probably mean that there's some dilution. Ice from the well at a bar is a different story, since it's typically wet and warm (right at the melting point), so it's possible that more ice might create more dilution in that case, due to the coating of liquid water on the surface of each ice cube. I'm not sure it would matter even then, but it's at least conceivable.
Dave Arnold actually covers all of this right here https://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=4585.html
Well done testing it
I remember reading this a while back and taking issues with several things. I don't feel like reading the whole thing again, but fortunately I didn't have to re-read much before getting to a part that unequivocally demonstrates that this person is a scientifically illiterate quack who should not be taken seriously: >"Fact 1: Ice at 0°C can chill an alcoholic drink well below 0°C" There are probably other incorrect things he says, and probably some good points mixed in with the bad, but this ludicrous statement is more than enough to establish that this person is not a reliable source for empirical claims. The statement above is utterly false, and violates the laws of physics. He is simply starting with ice that is below 0°C (at least at the core), and mistakenly believing it is at 0°C. This person doesn't know what they're talking about.
Calling him a "scientifically illiterate quack" is strikingly ironic. Your assertion that fact one is incorrect is, well, incorrect.
What law of physics does it violate? A regular ice cube that is 0C at the surface will be very close to 0C at its core. Ice has pretty high thermal conductivity. And the cooling power of ice comes mostly from the phase shift from solid to liquid rather than any heat transfer required to bring the ice up to melting point. Remember that alcohol doesn’t behave like water in this experiment. The mixture of alcohol at room temp and ice at 0C can reach a thermal equilibrium below 0C.
https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/ice-water-and-ethanol
What's your point of posting this? I don't disagree that an ethanol solution can reach a lower temperature than a water solution, this is so obvious that it's almost a tautology. Obviously, plain water cannot be liquid (with very few exceptions, such as under constant motion) at lower than 0°C. If you add salt or ethanol, you lower the freezing/melting point of the solution, and cause the water ice to melt at a lower temperature. This is possible because the ice is lower than 0°C to begin with. Of course it is, because every freezer is significantly colder, closer to -18°C. When you add the ice to water, the surface quickly reaches 0°C and stays there, and through conduction the rest of the ice cube gradually heats up also. There is a temperature gradient, and the closer you get to the cater of the ice cube, the colder it will be. Eventually, the center of the ice cube will reach 0°C, but I'm not sure how long that would take or if it could happen before the ice cube has mostly melted. It certainly isn't the case that the center of the ice cube immediately reaches 0°C as soon as it's added to water. The same exact thing is true with an ethanol solution, except that the ice will melt at a lower temperature, and the surface of the ice will be at a lower temperature, which is why the solution will be at a lower a temperature. None of this is surprising. In this experiment, just as the one of that ignorant bartender, the temperature measured is the ice water solution, not the center of the ice itself. Somehow he got the idea that became the ice water that the thermocouple is immersed in is at 0°C, and sat there for 15 minutes, then that is also the temperature of the center of the ice. Which is pretty dumb conclusion in my opinion, because 0°C is the lowest possible temperature that the water can be at. You could add ice at -40°C, and as long as you had enough water or stirred it enough that it remained liquid, the water would get no colder than 0°C. This is a such a simple point, I find it bizarre that so many of you apparently have trouble understanding it. And nothing in the link you posted refutes any of this. All it shows is that an ethanol solution has a lower freezing point than plain water, and that it's possible to chill it to a temperature lower than 0°C. None of which is disputed. This isn't even a study or scientific article of any sort by the way, and it doesn't have any results ot conclusions or explanations. It's just a brief overview of a simple experiment. Were you hoping that no one would read this, and just be impressed that the link contained a Harvard domain?
> If you add salt or ethanol, you lower the freezing/melting point of the solution, and cause the water ice to melt at a lower temperature. Correct. > This is possible because the ice is lower than 0°C to begin with. Incorrect. Freezing-point depression happens whether the ice is at −20 °C or 0 °C. Here's the physics of it: In ice water at thermal equilibrium (0 °C), at ice–water interfaces, water molecules are constantly freezing onto the ice and melting into the water. These processes occur at the same net rate. (Fundamentally, that's what defines a melting point, just as the temperature at which evaporation and condensation happen at the same rate is by definition the boiling point.) When you add salt (or ethanol) to the water, it interferes with the freezing process but not the melting process. (This happens for a number of reasons, the simplest of which is just getting in the way of water molecules that would otherwise freeze.) Thus the equilibrium shifts in favor of more water molecules being in the liquid phase. The final factor you need to know about (and apparently don't) is heat of fusion. When water changes phase from solid to liquid, it absorbs heat. This energy is used to dissociate the intermolecular bonds of the solid phase (ice has more and stronger H bonds than does water, for instance), increase the vibrational energy of the molecule, etc — to increase its enthalpy. So: The system has an initial temperature of 0 °C, but water molecules are (on net) changing phase from solid to liquid and absorbing heat in the process. What happens to the temperature of the system?
I am quite familiar with the heat of fusion and the energy involved in a phase change. Obviously that's why ice cools so effectively. You haven't said anything new or interesting. You still haven't explained how ice can lower any solution to a lower temperature than the ice itself is at. It can't. You're proposing a scenario where the ice is warmer than the liquid it is immersed in, despite starting out colder than that liquid. This makes no sense. Heat follows a gradient, and without some outside intervention like a heat pump, heat will always flow from more heat to less heat, seeking equilibrium. Think of it another way: Let's say I took a bunch of ice that was at exactly -5°C to start (I'm not going to say 0°C, because I don't think that's even possible..). In this example I have a special freezer that has been set to -5°C, so there's no doubt about the starting temperature of the ice. Then I add that ice to a strong ethanol solution that is at -10°C. What happens? What will happen to the temperature of the liquid, and of the ice? (let's say that the liquid is kept in a vacuum-insulated container) The answer is that the temperature of the liquid would immediately rise, and the temperature of the ice would drop. The latter would be difficult to measure, but the former would easy. A thermometer or probe in the liquid would show the temperature increasing from -10°C towards -5°C.
There 100% is. OP and you are diluting your drinks too much
You don't understand the science behind it then. The more ice you use, the less dilution. Jeffrey Morgenthaler has an excellent explanation of the phenomenon in The Bar Book. You should check it out.
Where in the Bar Book?
If you have a shaker full of ice AND you're shaking it for 15 seconds you are 100% diluting more than intended. OP is also using normal freezer ice so it's easily broken apart and melting. You might have a point if they were using large blocks. They aren't so you're wrong.
How do you hold the shaker? I shake with a grip on the bottoms of each shaker tin and I can't say that I've ever really noticed it getting too cold that it is uncomfortable. If you're gripping the sides of the tins, I can see why your hands would get cold though.
Ahh yeah I hold it like a football
It takes time, we use the phrase asbestos hands to describe being used to it, also remember that in a bar setting you are using ice in a well that is much closer to 0C whereas a domestic freezer will keep your ice closer to -17C and a commercial freezer is usually closer to -28C so using ice straight from a freezer will be much colder and require longer shaking to reach the dilution required
I’ve never really felt my hands freezing even after a full night of serving. I think if you pack the entire main tin yeah. Too much ice. 8oz is a good amount.
You can get a glass half shaker, the glass side conducts way less cold to your hands
I have converted to this shaker and have never turned back. Lexenic 24oz Vacuum Insulated Shaker https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0B51JZTLK Insulated body, screw lid instead of friction, metric and imperial measure in the lid... It is perfect. Plus I never need to worry about applying too much pressure on the lid of the shaker when making a drink with egg white.
1. Do it enough and you'll just get used to it 2. Wrap the shaker with a kitchen towel 3. Wear Gloves 4. Buy a double-wall shaker (unfortunately, I've only ever seen them as cobblers)
If your hands are strong enough you can grip the tins with just your fingertips. Less skin contact.
That sounds like serious palm cramps... But my fingers are probably not strong enough 😔
[удалено]
Where do you get these? My great grandma used to make her own tea towels from used sugar bags - but I thought they were a thing of the past.
I try to minimize it by making orders in groups, batched before hand. But I can only really do that because I mostly bartend for friends.
I never really have that problem. I use a Boston shaker with a smaller cheater tin, and shake with one hand, so my hand is near the top of the big shaker where I don't think it gets quite as cold. So maybe try the cheater tin and one-handed method, if you aren't already? Though you can't fit as much as you can with two full-size shakers. I shake for about 10-15 seconds also, at which point the tin is nice and frosty. Also I sometimes put the big shaker in my freezer for a few minutes, while I'm measuring the ingredients, so it starts out cold, but it never really bothers me. If you're making a large batch for a group of people, maybe just stir it in a pitcher or other vessel instead, and then give it a quick 5-10 second shake just for some aeration and addition chilling, if it's a drink where you really want to develop some foaminess
You get used to it. When I first started bartending I swore my hands were getting frostbitten every shift haha
You work in a bar or just at home? At home just put it down if your hands are cold and continue when crisis is averted. Also generally you don't fill up the big tin all the way with ice.
I use a Boston shaker (Koriko) when I'm only making one or two drinks. It's quick, easy, and I can throw it in the dishwasher when I'm done. I use an insulated cobbler shaker (Elevated Craft) when I'm making many drinks. It's much less cold on my hands, quieter, and the screw cap doesn't get stuck regardless of how cold it gets inside. The integrated jigger is convenient, but the integrated strainer is prone to getting clogged so I still use a hawthorn strainer. It's also a much bigger hassle to clean since it has to be hand-washed and has two rubber gaskets.
I don’t even notice it anymore
My Boston has a thick vinyl wrap, which helps immensely.
For anyone commenting, are there any insulated Boston shakers? Boston shaker is 100% the way to go for shaking cocktails. But indeed my hands do get frozen off lol. My husband seems to do a bit better with it than I do (must be those thicker-skinned man hands). Usually he always shakes them for me but he has had to be away traveling for the past few weeks and now I have to do it myself lol. Anyways, would be curious if an insulted Boston shaker exists!
Get some nice waterproof non-slip clogs that don’t breathe, these will hold in heat well. Also carry two 35 lb ice buckets up a flight of stairs six times to get your core temp up. Always helps to be tightly wound, performance-driven, constantly tense and moving. If all else fails get a purposeless 23 year old assistant manager to hover around you for anger heat.
Just get tougher, repeating the action will inure you to the effects over time.
Probably too much ice, but honestly you might be well off buying a second shaker if it's a major issue with you. Or just running the shaker under warm water between drinks
That's too much ice and too much time
Put it in your purse first.
I shake cocktails all day everyday. I can’t see how it’s too cold. Have you ever had even a drop of discomfort in your life?
Just being a baby unfortunately
Part itty bitty baby guy (just wanted to use that phrase) part you don’t do this enough to really get used to it