Product review (5 stars): Nice ice balls
My family is kind of nuts about ice.  Last year for Mother's Day we gave my wife a huge commercial ice maker.  It makes the small "nugget ice" (also called Sonic ice, named after the Sonic drive-in restaurants).  Our ice maker makes a couple hundred pounds of ice per day (not that we consume that much every day).  Our little nugget ice is great for quickly cooling down drinks, but it also melts very quickly and dilutes the drink.

The ice from this set of ice balls couldn't be more opposite from what our commercial ice maker makes.  These big ice balls barely melt at all, depending on how fast or slowly you drink your beverage.  It's all a matter of surface area.  If you think of this ice ball a little larger than a tennis ball, it has a certain surface area.  If you were to cut it in half it would add about half as much surface area (the area of the sphere, plus the two areas of the circles caused by the two new halves).  If my math is right and this ice ball has a radius of about an inch and a half, I think the surface area would be about 28 inches.  If you cut it in half, you would have two additional surfaces on each of the hemispheres with surfaces areas of about seven inches each, or 14 inches total.  So the sphere is 28, and cutting it in half adds about half that, or 14 inches, totaling about 42 inches.  If you keep chopping these parts up until they equal the size of my nugget ice, you have approximately a WHOLE BUNCH of surface area that's eager to melt into your drink (pardon my round figures).

Anyway, setting aside the nerdy math that I'm not even very good with, it's simple enough to say that less surface area means less melting.  Less melting means less diluting of your drink with water.  I guess the most perfect insurance against dilution is those rocks that you put in your freezer, but I haven't had such good luck with those.

After nursing a good glass of whiskey for about a half hour, my big ball of ice was mostly still intact.  If I'd used cubes or the nuggets that my machine makes, the ice would have completely melted in that same time.  So the ice balls definitely do a better job of cooling the drink without diluting it.

As far as making the ice, these round ice molds couldn't be any easier.  The recipe for actually making the ice is a time honored tradition that has probably already been passed down through the generations in your own family, so you don't have much to worry about.  There's also a easy to see fill line, so you shouldn't have any trouble figuring out how much of that "secret ingredient" to add to make your ice.

So if you're a purist who likes a cold glass of liquor but doesn't want a lot of water in it, then this is a good solution for you and a fun conversation piece.

I was provided this item for review.