Greenland startup begins shipping glacier ice to cocktail bars in the UAE

tardigrada@beehaw.org to World News@beehaw.org – 67 points –
Greenland startup begins shipping glacier ice to cocktail bars in the UAE
theguardian.com

Arctic Ice harvests ice from the fjords of Greenland, and then ships them to the United Arab Emirates to sell to exclusive bars. Using glacial ice in drinks is a common practice in Greenland, and, over the years, several entrepreneurs have unsuccessfully attempted to export it.

Its co-founder Malik V Rasmussen said the ice, which has been compressed over millennia, is completely without bubbles and melts more slowly than regular ice. It is also purer than the frozen mineral water usually used in Dubai’s ice cubes.

25

When the world starts burning, these guys will be selling marshmallows on the side. Fuck everything about this, from the bottom of my heart.

You gotta make a living. Why not make a living off of those stupid idiots who value your magic ice over regular ice. It's like selling overpriced paper cards with pretty pictures to kids who love Pokemon. Except kids are kids and these arabs are supposed to be fully capable adults. It's a low risk, high reward game. I can't blame them.

Maybe because it makes global warming much worse, shipping refridgerated ice through the air to the desert?

What a stupid waste of resources. Ice is ice.

I hope Greenland just takes the orders but instead uses ice made by huge freezers in Romania.

Ditto except why not put the freezers in Dubai

I was thinking of maximising profit but maybe Greenland could get a good deal on the packed down snow at the end of the Dubai ski "season".

You havent drank glacier water. It's much more than just frozen water.

Just sums up our dumb fucking species.

That's dumb, just drink your cocktail with normal ice, or use RO water if you really can taste the mineral content.

There are specialty companies in New York City that supply cocktail ice, but the ice is designed with a good flavor profile and is completely clear.

RO water would be the opposite of what you'd want if you want all the non-water things in your ice

The claim here from the summary is that the water is more pure than the mineral water. You could also just do distilled water and customize the mineral content with additions like brewers and sparkling water makers do. I just don't see how it would be cost effective to ship thousands of pounds of glacier ice vs freezing as needed. You could even make a pressurized freezer and probably achieve the same effect.

This business is built on people with more money than sense.

It's not cost effective nor is it pure. Both mineral water and glacier water are far from pure water. People want them because they're not pure, in a chemical sense.

People want them because they're posturing conspicuous consumers.

That's just some hocus pocus bullshit marketing. No one would be able to pass a blind taste test on these because the alcohol would overwhelm their taste buds.

Again, more money than sense.

Yes but without the alcohol I'm sure you'd taste a difference between ground water and glacial water.Glacier melt has a lot of impurities that gives it a distinctive taste.

You're so busy being pedantic that you're missing my entire point, so congrats you win the conversation.

I always wonder what they were thinking as they chopped down the last tree on easter island.

I put this in the cross post, bit figure it belongs here, too:

While ridiculous, there's interesting context here.

  • Greenland has little to no economy
  • The ice is mined from ice that has already broken away from the glacier, thus not reducing any more than nature has already
  • Cargo ships bringing frozen food used to leave empty, now that same fuel is used to transport ice back instead of going to waste
  • The founder has always dreamed of a sustainable economy for Greenland
  • He is conflicted about how his work to do this in a sustainable way is being taken

Lots of gray here.

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary Drinking a cocktail on top of a Dubai skyscraper may seem decadent enough, but a Greenland entrepreneur wants to add ancient glacier ice scooped from the fjords to the glass, for the ultimate international thrill.

Using glacial ice in drinks is a common practice in Greenland, and, over the years, several entrepreneurs have unsuccessfully attempted to export it.

These parts of the ice sheets have not been in contact with any soils or contaminated by pollutants produced by human activities.

Other reactions and private messages have gone even further, including some comments which, according to Rasmussen, have “verged on death threats”.

The first stage of the shipping, from Greenland to Denmark, is, Arctic Ice argues, of low carbon-intensity, as most refrigerated shipping containers that leave Greenland would have been empty, because the country imports more frozen goods than it exports.

It has now committed to becoming fully carbon-neutral, and once the supply chain has been established and Arctic Ice’s carbon footprint calculated, all excess emissions will be calculated and compensated for, either through carbon capture and storage, or through emerging technologies that suck CO2 out of the air.


Saved 72% of original text. :::

This sounds SUPER sustainable. And THANK GOODNESS the superior humans of the UAE get to drink their hypocritical cocktails with whacky ice!!!