If you’re driving down the street and see a Volkswagen Jetta with the license plate “CUBES,” chances are you’re sharing the road with Jim Blakey, the “ice guy.”
That is how friends now view the retired lawyer, and that reputation certainly tracks. As the founder of the Hingham-based startup ClearlyFrozen, Blakey, 71, has devoted the last nine years and counting to figuring out how to make perfectly clear ice cubes at home, a process that can be surprisingly complex. Today, he’s sold nearly 50,000 ice trays to more than 300 bars and restaurants across the country, along with consumers worldwide.
Blakey worked in law for 40-plus years and had no prior expertise in mixology, the restaurant industry, or chemistry. It was his personal obsession with clear ice that propelled him to work on ClearlyFrozen once his law career began winding down.
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“I’m sort of an old guy,” Blakey said in a recent interview. “This is not what I expected to be doing when I retired.”
His second professional act has become all-consuming: He spends a lot of time answering ice-related emails, and even his kitchen cabinet knobs are cube-shaped. The company officially launched in 2018 and is growing at a time when the co*cktail industry is booming post-pandemic, and more and more people want the true bar experience — with mixed drinks paired with clear ice — at home.
“It’s a phenomenon,” he said. “If you were to go onto Amazon and type in clear ice six years ago, you’d find a handful of products that would make clear ice at home. Now you can find page after page of products.”
But ClearlyFrozen, which sells for $44, is clearly special. With US patents granted last year on his tray’s latest design, it stands out among the other products with thousands of positive reviews and plenty of awards. Wine Enthusiast named it “Best for Clear Ice” last year, and Food & Wine named it “Best for Clear co*cktail Ice.” Amazon reviewers are raving, too: “The cubes are amazing. They are flawless and sparkly, and if you have a big enough glass they fit just fine. Also, they don’t melt as quickly.”
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The idea started in 2015, when Blakey’s refrigerator ice machine broke and he went to the supermarket to pick up a bag. While there, it struck him that this ice was different than the type he was able to make at home, and he began wondering what the right setup would be to achieve the same result.
“I’d never really looked at ice before, but I saw the difference,” he said. “I started looking into it and wound up going down the rabbit hole on the internet.”
He quickly found that home clear ice makers were quite expensive and complicated to use. From there, he began digging, researching theories on clear ice from online forums and mixology blogs and messing with creating his own trays. Initially, this fascination wasn’t even tied to an entrepreneurial venture.
“I was just fiddling around gluing foam boxes together with Gorilla Glue, getting water all over the kitchen, and getting my wife pissed,” he said. “But then at some point I said wait a minute, maybe there’s a business here.”
His breakthrough came when he discovered the concept of directional freezing, where water can be frozen from top down instead of from the sides toward the center of an ice cube. Blakey said this is the key to his product’s viability, as this process forces cloudy impurities from the cubes.
“The tray is insulated on the bottom and it’s insulated on the sides, but it’s open at the top,” he said. “So these ice crystals are forming and pushing anything that isn’t H or O down and out of the ice cubes — it’s sort of like what happens with a lake in the winter.”
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Making ice from a ClearlyFrozen tray is a bit more time-consuming than a standard ice tray, with the best results coming after 16 to 18 hours of freezing, according to the website. However, Blakey says this is worth it, as clear ice provides some real benefits in a co*cktail.
“There’s more ice in clear ice than there is in cloudy ice,” he said. “That means that it’s got more cooling power, it lasts longer in a drink, and it dilutes the drink more slowly.”
Plus, its aesthetic value can’t be overlooked, from the sound it makes (clear ice clinks, while cloudy ice clunks, he said) to how it looks.
“If you go into a fancy bar and order a bourbon on the rocks and they’re charging you 15 bucks for it, it’s nice to have a good-looking piece of ice in it,” he said.
Blakey’s ClearlyFrozen gamble has paid off — plus it’s filled a void most people didn’t even know existed.
“I’ve sold almost 50,000 of them now, but I started without knowing whether I could sell one,” he said.
Henry Bova can be reached at henry.bova@globe.com.
