News: NewAir Countertop Whiskey Ice Ball Maker

While we typically hover around premium cigar and accessory reviews here at Cigar Dojo, we also have a weekly pairings show (shoutout: Flavor Odyssey); this gives us license to branch into libation territory if the mood strikes.

Enter the NewAir Countertop Whiskey Ice Ball Maker (aka NewAir NIM005BSW0), a luxury-geared ice maker that aims to craft clear, spherical ice for cocktail enthusiasts.

Those familiar with NewAir (from the cigar hobby) will likely know the company for their humidors, but their gadgets extend to a bevy of categories, including a wide range of ice makers. Priced from $99 to $1,200, NewAir has an ice maker for just about any occasion, mostly focusing on ice nuggets, bullets, and clear ice. The NewAir Countertop Whiskey Ice Ball Maker appears to be the sole unit designed strictly for whiskey and cocktail hobbyists.

NewAir NIM005BSW0 Breakdown

Key Features

*As suggested by manufacturer

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Appearance

As previously mentioned, this unit has design aesthetics recognizable to those familiar with NewAir. It’s a sleek, unassuming setup—one that will feel right at home in the average at-home bar. The unit is about the size (or perhaps a little larger) of your old desktop computer from the ’90s. It has a matte black finish, a buttonless door (easy access), and a glossy black LED panel that clearly displays the ice maker’s status and alerts, etc.

Setup

It’s a relatively straightforward setup, at least in terms of testing to see if everything’s working properly (more on this in a moment). After removing all the packaging and tape, there are a few extra parts concealed within the unit. This includes ice tongs and a drain box (which is needed to catch excess water from the condenser, etc.). Inside the drain box, you’ll find some tubing, which needs to be cut to length (depending on your setup) and plugged into the back of the ice maker and the drain box.

Next, you’ll need to give the unit a quick cleaning—simply use warm water on a cloth. This process is made a bit more difficult than I’d like, as you have to remove the ice tray with a screwdriver and press a concealed button in order for the door to open fully… this allows full access to clean the ice maker’s interior (this is also the recommended method to reach ice that happens to fall behind the tray).

After removing/cleaning the water reservoir, fill it with purified/distilled water (NewAir recommends using water filtered by RO reverse osmosis membrane for the best clarity or purified water for best results). Finally, you’ll use a level and the adjustable feet of unit to ensure it’s sitting on a level surface, plug it in, and hold the power button for three seconds. That’s about it—the LED should switch to “Making Ice,” and you’re off and running.

Quality / Build

From the outset, this is an A+, with the ice maker seemingly featuring quality materials, a sturdy feel in opening/closing the door, and a clean LED display that lets you know what to do and when to do it. However, within a few days of use, my criticisms began to pile up. For starters, the ice catcher doesn’t always catch the ice… Sure, there are times when it’s the user’s fault (opening the door at the same moment an ice ball is dropping), but there are also times when you’ll find ice behind the drawer without intervention. What you’re supposed to do (recommended by NewAir) is use a screwdriver to remove the tray and grab the spare ice ball. In reality, I’ve found that you can squeeze your hand behind the tray to grab the ball (then again, maybe I have small hands).

Now, I need to spend some time on the aforementioned drain box. Needed to catch disposed water from the unit, the drain box is about six inches tall. Taking into account the fact that the box needs to be lower than the outlet from the ice maker, you’re going to have to do some MacGyver-ing here. This is because the outlet from the unit is located near ground level, meaning you have two options: a) raise the unit by about six inches using a pedestal, or b) drill holes through your cabinetry to route the drain line accordingly. Assuming you get it all set up properly, you then have an additional hurdle, as there are no clamps or locking mechanism on the drain box. The drain line is somewhat rigid, and tends to pull the lid off of the drain box. In my situation, I placed a weight over the lid to keep it in place.

And then there’s the leaking issue… Yes, every time the ice maker fires up to do its thing, excess water spills from, as far as I can tell, the bottom of the unit. It’s not coming from the drain line. I have the ice maker sitting on a concrete counter, so it’s not causing much damage, but I can see this being much worse for situations where wood or other materials are nearby.

Finally, there’s the noise pollution of running the unit, which is… not quiet. Getting back to the ’90s desktop comparison, it’s like when you were doing something graphically intensive, and all the fans were on full blast. Then again, that’s probably an understatement—it’s loud enough that you won’t want it out in the open in say, the same room that you’re watching TV.

Ice Balls

This is what you’re truly here for: the ice!

The NewAir Countertop Whiskey Ice Ball Maker sets out to bring you that clear, round ice—the kind you’d expect to find in the craft cocktail served to you by a mustachioed mixologist at your local speakeasy-themed establishment.

After filling up the water reservoir, the ice maker gets straight to work, churning out the first two balls (it makes them two at a time) in a little over two hours. The first four balls are junk, which NewAir advises to toss. After that, the speed and clarity pick up the pace, with subsequent ice pairs being crafted in a little over an hour, with each ball being clearer in quality than the last (up until the fourth pair or so). The balls are about two inches in diameter, being slightly on the small side, at least in my opinion. Like nearly every spherical ice ball you’ll come across, there’s a seam running down the center. In terms of clarity, I’d say about 60 percent of each ball is nice and clear (with a hazy flair clouding up the opposing hemisphere).

This is all well and (somewhat) good, until we get into the ice storage portion of the equation. Putting it simply: the unit is not cold enough to store ice. Unless you grab an ice ball as it’s coming down the chute, it WILL NOT be spherical. Even an hour or so is enough time to cause flat spots on the ice, which begins to compound when the balls start piling up. With a fresh water refill (which is basically required every day), the unit fills up with ice (about 10 to 12 ice balls) in around six hours. It’s this speed that I find as the ice maker’s best feature. On the other hand, the lack of cooling capabilities causes all but the latest two to four balls to be unusable—there are times when literally every ice ball is fused together, forming a chandelier of ice and slush that progressively degrades in quality from top to bottom.

All this being said, if you grab a freshy before it melts, the ice balls seem to do the cocktail justice. In a standard rocks glass, the ice fits nicely, having close to a quarter-inch of space between the glass and ice on each side. Differing from the ice’s state in the ice maker, the ice melts relatively slowly in your cocktail (which is one of the main reasons you’d opt for this style of ice in the first place), being a little more than half its starting size by the time I could finish an old fashioned.

Ice progression, showing older (top left) to fresher (bottom right) ice balls

Purchase Recommendation

I… just… can’t. At $700, this thing is no small undertaking. It’s not even your “justifiably expensive” purchase (like that PS5 you’re getting yourself for Christmas). No, this is strictly for the bougie factor—something to set your bar apart from your buddy’s lame spherical ice ball tray that he has to fill by hand and keep in the freezer (of all places). At this price, I’d actually prefer to jump up to the next tier in terms of investment and spring for a full-fledged refrigerator/freezer capable of churning out craft ice. With some brief research, I’ve found these for as low as $2,000. Granted, that’s a sale price (down from $4,600), but appliances are basically always on sale, right? Regardless, I’ll either take the old-school ice tray or the full-fledged freezer, as they both have one thing in common: being cold enough to keep the ice… ice.

• The NewAir makes two ice balls in roughly an hour, while a traditional freezer and ice mold setup takes around four hours to fully freeze (at least in my tests).
• Both the NewAir and more traditional spherical ice molds produce ice with a noticeable seam down the center. The only method, as far as I can tell, to avoid this, are the spherical ice press systems such as this.
• To keep a constant flow of usable ice, you essentially have to refill the water reservoir every 24 hours, discarding the bad ice along the way.
• I also bought this ice mold for some comparisons in this review. What I like about these are that the spheres are not connected, meaning you can scatter them about in the various nooks and crannies of the freezer. They seal incredibly well, including a little silicone lid that covers the small hole where you pour the water. I’ve accidentally dropped one of these things before they were frozen, and no water was spilled. The ice balls produced are about a quarter-inch larger than the NewAir’s, which I found to fill a rocks glass a bit better. That being said, the NewAir is much faster at freezing, and makes a clearer ice ball.
• While I understand the want for a good ice ball, I do find it a bit funny the lengths we go to get there. After all, is a sphere truly better or more desirable than a cube? Even when taking the craft cocktail bar example into account, the first image that pops into my head is not an ice ball—it’s a hand-chiseled cube, custom cut from a larger ice block in order to fit the glass at hand. Large ice trays are incredible easy to fill and keep ready for a moment’s notice. As an added bonus, ice cubes will never have the unwanted flat sides that you’ll find on the NewAir balls… because, you know, they’re cubes.
• So long as I’m dishing out links, here is my personal pick for the oversized cube-shaped ice mold.
• The process of making perfectly clear ice involves directional freezing, pushing impurities and air bubbles to a particular side of the ice mold. This produces ice blocks that are clear on one side and cloudy on the other, allowing you to carve away the ideal-sized ice for the glass at hand (this is what I was referring to with the craft cocktail bar above). This is why it’s difficult to get clear ice balls, unless you combine this ice chiseling method with the ice press system mentioned above. This video gives a quick overview on the process of making perfectly clear ice.
• For what it’s worth, if I were to keep this unit after review, my wife made it clear that the ice maker would not be kept on the bar top (i.e. out in the open). This was before we found out how noisy it was. In other words, it may not be an ugly device, but it’s still not something that’s going to improve the aesthetic of your space.

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