Neat Ice Kit (Double Mold) - Clear Ice Cube Mold

I've tried a number of budget methods to make clear ice at home: putting ice molds upside down in a small cooler in the freezer, adjusting the freezer temperature to just below freezing, etc. They all worked, but involved a lot of chiseing and chopping or took too much time. This kit works great. Getting started is easy. Whacking the cloudy bottom off the elongated piece of ice is easy, and doesn't take long. You end up with a pretty good sized piece of crystal clear ice. It is too big for some of my cocktail glasses, but applying the chisel a few more times quickly produces whatever size ice I need. Must be psychological, but I swear my rum tastes better with clear ice. Looks good too, because the clear ice is almost invisible - beats the cloudy half moons that come out of my refrigerator.

I just finished making my first batch of ice with this kit. I was surprised how long it took to freeze -- about 24 hours, probably because the thick foam insulates the water from the very cold temperature in the freezer. But that's not what prompted me to write this, one of my first ever Amazon reviews. After using the chisel as directed to break off the clear portion of the ice (for the first time), I saw a very small dark object on the ice. Thinking my recently cleaned cutting board may have had something on it, I brushed it away with the many little pieces of ice. Then I noticed that there were seven new very small chipped areas on the sharp edge of the chisel. It looked like I had been cutting granite, instead of frozen water. Small pieces of steel had broken off and I only saw one of them. The other six pieces apparently got mixed in with the ice. I don't want a product that inserts pieces of a steel chisel into the ice I put in my drinks. I will ask for a refund. I'm not a doctor or scientist, and can't say for sure what the effects are of drinking a liquid with chips of steel chisel, but common sense tells me that this product, or at least the chisel, should be removed from the market until the problems can be solved. I should probably be writing the Consumer Products Safety Commission too. I'll try to attach a photo of the chisel, but I don't have a macro lens and can't get a quality closeup.

I loved the idea of having large clear ice cubes for cocktails. The idea is fantastic and I was so taken with the video showing how easy it is to use the chisel and mallet to perfectly split the ice block in half, yet the reality is different. Perhaps it's having hard water, but even though I let the ice block sit a while, banging the chisel tends to just chip away at the ice. I bang harder and eventually the block splits, not straight down but at an angle. A ton of effort and ice chips all over the kitchen for very imperfect ice. I can't blame Studio Neat for the reality of physics—again, perhaps it's the water—but you may be better off having less clear cube moulds instead of this product (especially since this is so expensive).

I bought this product and ended up liking it very much, but makes things a bit over simplified if you don't know a bit about how to cut the ice properly and can make quite a few mistakes like i did when i started making ice with this. +Pro: The clear ice you get out of these is pretty big, and with the glasses i have at home i either use them as a large cube for an old fashioned or cut them smaller for other drinks. The cloudy part of the ice is useful for shaking and mixing if you tend to use different sized ice for different drinks. +Pro: The ice you get is big, nice, and square. I ended up using a 9 quart cooler filled with water and shoved into my freezer to get clear ice in a variety of sizes, but having the neat ice kit is still useful if i want to have a nice large perfect cube to carve into balls or different shapes. Middle: From reviews i saw of this and the "instructions" that come with it, they make it seem too easy and can lead to people complaining that the ice doesn't cut properly. It would be nice if the chisel came with a "saw" like side to score the ice and make it easier to cut as tempering to make sure its a perfect cube takes a while and not everyone is that patient when you're trying to prepare a drink. -Con: The chisel chipped on first use. This wasn't a huge problem as it worked fine, but I don't but products and expect them to get damaged when using it. It seemed to me they made the chisel too sharp and the edge of the chisel just couldn't handle being hammered against ice. -Con: The wooden muddle you get looks terrible after regular use as the chisel leaves dents on the wood. This isn't a problem for some, but mine looks pretty bad so I just use it as a muddler and use a rubber mallet to chip the ice as I don't have to hit down as hard and let gravity do the work for me.

Great packaging and was excited to start using the ice molds. Everything came as advertised. Ice takes overnight to freeze sufficiently and like they advertise, the cloudy part of the ice does stay in the bottom half and the top half is beautiful and clear! Problem with this though starts when you try to unmold the ice. Unless I'm doing something wrong, it is a royal pain to push the orange silicon sleeve out of the molds once the ice is frozen. I'm a big guy and my thumbs are not small but with all my might I can only push the sleeves out from the bottom maybe an inch and it's not enough to easily pull the sleeve out from the top. After light usage I have already torn the corner on one of the molds in wrestling with the sleeve to get it out. Once the orange sleeve is out, everything works beautifully: the ice releases from the sleeve, the chisel cuts are perfect and makes sharp cuts the way you want. Tempted to return the product though, just because it is too difficult to get the frozen sleeve out of the mold. If anyone else has encountered this and has a solution please let me know. Update: went back and watched the video again to see if I was doing something wrong and they don't even show that part of the process. So maybe intentionally they leave that out, not sure.