Meet Penny Pound Ice, Pioneers of the L.A. Movement for Better Ice
With clients like Thunderbolt and Mozza, the Skid Row-based ice company knows that great cocktails require exceptional ice.
Photographs by David Gurzhiev
A good way to judge the quality of a bar is by its Negroni. When correctly crafted, the Italian cocktail — one part gin, one part Campari, and one part red vermouth — is served over a single big square ice cube, often referred to as a rock. One rock is denser than several smaller ice cubes and has less total surface area, meaning it melts more slowly. “The intention is that it preserves the cocktail as presented to you by the bartender,” says Matt Brown, the managing partner of Los Angeles-based ice company Penny Pound Ice. “Because that’s when a cocktail is going to be its best—when it’s handed to you by the bartender.”
Not enough establishments in L.A. serve Negronis because not enough restaurants and bars have licenses to serve more than wine and beer. But the best places that do pour liquor, including cocktail bars like the award-winning Thunderbolt in Echo Park and celebrity chef David Chang’s Chinatown restaurant Majordomo, tend to be clients of Penny Pound Ice.
On a recent Monday morning, around 9:45 a.m., a dozen employees are on the 56-degree production floor of the company’s 4,900-square-foot facility on Skid Row. They’re wearing work coats to keep warm and maneuvering power saws to cut Normandies, the name of Penny Pound’s large rocks, with dimensions of 2” by 2” by 2.5”. “We’re on hour four, so we’re warmed up,” says Brown. “Warmed up might be the wrong word,” he adds, laughing. Most of his 16 employees clock in around 6 a.m., but a typical day starts even earlier, at 3 a.m., when Penny Pound’s “block guru,” Anton, arrives to pull 20 300-pound ice blocks from their freezing tubs. At 10:30 a.m., the staff breaks for lunch, and by 1 p.m., they’ll be done cutting. The rest of the day is spent packing ice.
(Above, audio of employees sawing rocks on the production floor.)
Filtered L.A. tap water is the only ingredient in Penny Pound’s ice. But there’s also an additional purifying element to how their ice comes together. Each crystal-clear 300-pound block takes three days to freeze “because it freezes up from the cooling coils on the bottom,” explains Brown. “That gives the water molecules time to really align and tesselate quickly, which also squeezes out a lot of the impurities.”
Situated inside the production floor are two walk-in freezers, both sub-20 degrees, which house finished and packed iced. Pastry racks are stacked with parchment paper-lined sheet pans filled with heart- and diamond-shaped ice, perfect spheres (2.4 inches in diameter), triangular Bermudas, five-inch-tall spears, and rocks galore. Edible orchids and miniature plastic toys are embedded in some rocks, while others are hand-stamped with unicorns, golf balls, and restaurant logos. In addition to rocks and specialty shapes, Penny Pound produces pebble ice and shake, the latter made from offcuts and used to stir cocktails. These bigger, imperfect chunks of ice enable bartenders to achieve a colder and less diluted drink. Although it takes longer to stir a martini with shake ice than with a handful of cubes, the quality of the resulting drink is much higher, says Brown.
Penny Pound Ice was founded in 2012 by Eric Alperin, a seasoned bartender and the owner of the esteemed speakeasy The Varnish, in addition to Pioneertown’s Red Dog Saloon and The Copper Room in Yucca Valley. For Alperin, a protégée of legendary New York City bartender Sasha Petraske, the reason for starting Penny Pound was simple: he valued high-quality ice and needed a local supplier for The Varnish. New York’s Hundredweight Ice had been established the year prior — cited by Brown as the root of the movement for top-notch ice designed for best-in-class cocktails — and was gaining steam. Beyond The Varnish, the first client for Alperin, his co-founder Cedd Moses, and his partner Gordon Bellaver (both bartenders as well), was none other than Nancy Silverton, whom Alperin had worked for when he first moved to Los Angeles. To this day, Penny Pound’s classic 1.75” by 1.75” by 2.5” rock is a crucial ingredient at Osteria Mozza’s amaro bar.
As the president of Penny Pound, Bellaver grew the company’s client roster to 300, which now includes grocery stores such as Bristol Farms and Cookbook. Penny Pound also delivers rocks, crushed ice, and specialty shapes to at-home customers as far as Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Palm Springs. In the aftermath of the pandemic, direct-to-consumer sales came to make up a large part of the business. Brown, yet another bartender who grew up in his father’s brewery (Wasatch Brewery in Park City, UT), came on board not long before COVID hit. Today, he’s Penny Pound’s head honcho.
Brown is also the pilot behind the newest facet of the Penny Pound operation: ice sculptures. Adjacent to the production floor is a 32-degree freezer room where pre-cut blocks are stored alongside frozen works of art. On the day we visited, handfuls of lip glosses from the beauty brand Saie were floating frozen inside a giant brick of ice. For the Grammy Awards back in February, Brown carved seven sculptures in one week, including a car-shaped creation.
Penny Pound only began offering custom sculptures after “I started hacking my way into it,” says Brown. He’s primarily self-taught, although he did attend a two-day camp hosted by one of their suppliers, Elegant Ice. Brown has served as the company’s sole sculptor for the last couple of years, but now, he has a trainee under his wing. “Soon, she’ll be a full-on carver,” he says.
A couple of exciting developments are in store for L.A.’s homegrown, high-end ice manufacturer, including freezer aisle placement in one of our most worshipped grocery chains. Also on the horizon this year is the acquisition of a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine, which will enable Penny Pound to stamp rocks automatically. (Currently, employees emboss every branded rock by hand, using metal stamps.) Meanwhile, Brown says there’s growth potential in the desert casinos, several of which Penny Pound is already supplying.
As for Brown’s dream client? Oga's Cantina, the Star Wars-themed bar in Disneyland. Cocktails don’t have to be so serious, but superior ice is essential to make a great drink.
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