By TONY CECCHINI

Once upon a time, ice was simply cold and hard. A barkeeper would scoop some into a shaker, pour on the spirits, cap it, give it a ride and strain it out, creating one of life’s great simple entertainments.

But now a coterie of young, ambitious mixologists are using enormous cubes custom made by ice sculpture suppliers for shakers, ice balls the size of oranges for drinks on the rocks, long ice tubes for highballs and pieces muddler-crushed in muslin for juleps.

Shaking styles themselves have also come under new scrutiny . For this, we largely can thank Kazuo Uyeda, who’s been mixing drinks for four decades in Tokyo, where a bartender can apprentice for six months simply handcarving ice shapes like diamonds and balls from blocks of ice.

Mr. Uyeda, who owns a bar named Tender in the Ginza district, is the inventor of a much-debated shaking technique he calls the hard shake, a choreographed set of motions involving a ferocious snapping of the wrists while holding the shaker slanted and twisting it.

According to his Web site, this imparts, among other things, greater chill and velvety bubbles that keep the harshness of the alcohol from contacting the tongue, while showering particles of ice across the drink’s surface.

In an attempt to shine the light of science on these issues, Eben Klemm, senior manager of wine and spirits for B.R. Guest restaurants and a former biotech researcher; Alex Day, a bartender at Death & Co. in Manhattan; and Dave Arnold, the director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute, recently presented a seminar at Tales of the Cocktail, an annual convention in New Orleans .

They conducted experiments to determine how shakers, sizes of ice and shaking styles affect dilution and chill rates.

To measure these, they rigged cocktail shakers with electronic thermocouples that projected data in graph form onto a screen. Using variations of large hunks, normal cubes and crushed ice, they ran trials shaking a variety of drinks. To the astonishment and embarrassment of more than a few bartenders present, they found effectively no difference for any of the variables.

Across a range of ice sizes and shaking styles that varied from Mr. Day’s mannered syncopation to Mr. Arnold’s self-described “crazy monkey,” all approaches arrived at almost exactly the same temperature and dilution.

The few defenders of the hard shake in the United States claim the experiment proves little, as the hard shake is more about the texture it creates than merely chilling and diluting.

Can such intangibles be measured? Gentlemen, start your thermocouples .


KO SASAKI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES / Kazuo Uyeda of Tokyo invented the “hard shake.”