Store Ice In A Brown Paper Bag To Keep The Cubes From Sticking

If you're an amateur bartender hoping to impress your party guests with your cocktail-making know-how, you'll need to have plenty of ice on hand. But because ice cubes are known to condense and stick together when stored in a plastic bag or bin, you may want to use preventative measures, namely storing your ice in a brown paper bag.

Typically, ice is stored in plastic bags or other airtight containers that prevent food odors from infiltrating the clean ice and affecting its flavor. But because the outer layer of ice cubes repeatedly melts and refreezes, ice often fuses together in plastic containers that don't allow excess moisture to escape.

To avoid opening the freezer on game day only to find that all of your individual ice cubes have fused to form a mangled miniature glacier, you might consider loading your ice cubes into a paper bag in advance. Simply pop the ice in a brown paper bag, roll the top closed to keep out any debris, and tuck it in the back of the freezer.

This trick will be effective whether you've acquired your ice by painstakingly filling ice cube trays, letting your refrigerator's built-in ice maker do all the work, or sending your significant other to the gas station to buy it by the bag. Exactly why it works isn't totally clear, but the reason could be that paper bags are porous, meaning excess moisture that would otherwise cause the ice cubes to bind to one another can escape.

If you're just storing enough ice to chill your daily iced coffee, a brown paper sandwich bag (like the one you used to carry your school lunch in) should suffice. If you're whipping up drinks for a house full of people, however, you might try a large paper grocery bag instead. Just remember: If you're making the ice at home, filling a bag that size may take some time. Start adding ice to the bag, batch by batch, a couple of weeks before the big day. Lastly, because paper bags won't keep out unwanted freezer flavors, you might also try tucking the paper bag in another container to keep cross-contamination at bay.