Here’s a tip for your next trip to your favorite watering hole: find the ice machine. The state of a bar’s ice machine speaks volumes about the establishment’s overall attitude toward the customer experience and, sadly, most bars fall frighteningly short. I remember a particular ice machine at a local bar that was crammed in the corner of a perpetually too-hot storage closet. The cooling vents looked like my dryer’s lint collector and sheets of ice would fall into the bin speckled with black dots. I stuck to pints (at least the beer lines were cleaned regularly).

But times, they are a-changin’. Upscale joints are now paying closer attention to their ice, ice, baby, (had to be done—just be glad it wasn’t this post’s headline), according to an article in the L.A. Times. Triple-filtered, custom-cubed, hand-chunked ice is becoming all the rage in places from the Windy City to all the way across the pond in London. But come on, just how important is ice to a cocktail? As long as I can taste the booze, does it really matter where my ice comes from or what it looks like?

You’re damn straight, it does. Ice impacts a cocktail in a number of ways:

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