The Best Way to Keep Your Soda and Seltzer Fizzy

Aug 19, 2023

Published September 7, 2022

Elissa Sanci

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Taking a sip of flat, lifeless soda or seltzer is a bummer, especially when you’re expecting the effervescent joy of your favorite drink. The trick to fizzier beverages is deceptively simple: It's not the shape of the glass or the temperature outside, but the clarity of the ice you’re using to chill your drink.

Clear ice keeps soda or seltzer bubbly for longer, and in turn ensures that it tastes delightfully fizzy with each sip. This is because clear ice is free of air pockets, which creates a smoother surface with fewer crevices for bubbles to form. Cloudy ice riddled with trapped air causes excessive fizziness the moment seltzer or soda hits it—and when that foam recedes, you’re left with a flat drink. (Drinking a soda with no ice at all helps preserve your drink's fizziness, but remember to stick it in the fridge for a few hours before cracking it open.)

For those intent on sipping only the sharpest seltzers and bubbliest sodas, we’ve found two reliable ways to make clear ice at home: the quick, expensive way or the cheaper, slower way.

If you ask Google how to make clear ice, the first handful of hits tells you that cloudy ice is cloudy because the water you used is filled with imperfections. This isn't true—boiling water before freezing it or using distilled or filtered water isn't going to yield clear ice.

Clear ice is clear simply because it's absent of air bubbles. Water naturally contains dissolved gasses, and "as you freeze the water, it forces the gasses out into a little bubble," said Greg Titian, host of the popular YouTube cocktail-making show How to Drink. "And if you freeze that water from the outside in a way that it typically will in an ice tray in your fridge, all those little bubbles get distributed through the ice cube, or they get stuck in the center."

Outside of clear-ice-making machines, the only way to make clear ice at home is with a method called directional freezing. "Instead of freezing from the outside in," Titian said, "[the water] freezes progressively from one side to the other." This pushes the air bubbles to one side, and results in a chunk of air bubble ice that you can cut off, which is essentially how clear-ice-making trays work. (More on those handy contraptions below.)

After testing different DIY methods, we’ve concluded that the only way to achieve large batches of crystal-clear ice cubes—sized perfectly for chilling sodas and seltzers—is a clear-ice maker. But these ice makers are pricey: The Luma Comfort, the only pick in our ice-maker guide that makes clear ice, costs about $230, a little over $100 more than our top-pick bullet-ice maker.

Clear-ice makers also work more slowly than bullet-ice makers. The Luma takes around 20 to 25 minutes to complete a batch of ice at room temperature, while our top-pick bullet-ice maker can crank out a batch of ice every seven to nine minutes. But batch sizes vary between the two types of ice makers: The Luma makes about three times as much ice per batch than the bullet-ice maker, so it all ends up evening out over time.

Another thing to keep in mind before purchasing a clear-ice maker is size. The Luma is big—larger than most other kitchen appliances but smaller than a microwave—so many people with small kitchens may not have the counter space for it. Make sure you have the storage space before adding another kitchen appliance to your arsenal.

The Luma reliably makes clear ice because the cubes form slowly with running water, which prevents air pockets from forming.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $177.

If you’re committed to keeping drinks bubbly but aren't keen on spending the money on a countertop clear-ice maker, you can really only make clear ice one other way at home: Use a clear-ice mold that employs directional freezing, like one we tested from True Cubes.

The True Cubes tray is easy to use—simply fill it with tap water and stick in the freezer—but the cubes take 18 to 20 hours to fully freeze. Because they’re intended to be used in cocktails, the True Cubes tray (which costs about $50) produces four 2-inch cubes rather than dozens of small cubes. You could break the ice down on your own (I thwacked my big cubes with a bar spoon), but it's a time-consuming, messy endeavor. The True Cubes tray, a 7-by-7-by-6-inch box, also takes up a significant amount of freezer space.

As we mentioned earlier, boiling water before freezing doesn't produce clear ice. To be sure, we tested the method ourselves using both filtered and tap water boiled once, along with filtered and tap water that was double-boiled (as in, water that was boiled once, cooled to room temperature, then boiled again). As predicted, the ice was just as cloudy as the ice made using unboiled water in the same Wirecutter-approved ice trays.

A DIY option that does work—if with considerable effort—is the so-called "cooler method," which involves freezing a single supersized ice cube in a personal-size cooler placed in your freezer. This ice-making technique requires several days to freeze—and once the ice is frozen, you have to cut it into cubes yourself. Popular Mechanics details this process, but we don't recommend it: The method seems too time-consuming and dangerous to be considered a practical way to consistently acquire clear ice.

This article was edited by Mark Smirniotis and Jason Chen.

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