CELL PHONES FOR SOLDIERS

DECEMBER 12, 2009 CHILL OUT OFFICE PARTY to benefit Cell Phones for Soldiers

Announcing the COOLEST Office party! Icebar Orlando has been designated as a drop off point for the Cell phones for Soldiers Holiday drive. We are offering small offices and individuals a FREE entry into our ICEBAR with a chilly drink in exchange for a used cellphone. These phones are turned into prepaid calling cards sent to soldiers who cannot make it home for the holidays to call and talk to their families. This is a great cause and we are proud to be part of the giving. Icebar Orlando invites all small offices that cannot hire a great hall or party place to join other small offices on December 12th to celebrate in style. Bring a cellphone and 10 guests and get our Freeze for Free package, one free for every paid entry.

Support the Military who are not with their families this holiday season. Drop off cellphones any day, or come on December 12th and celebrate with us.

Food, live music, fun and frolic watch our fire breathing bartenders do their juggling act. Enjoy our dance floor and see the brand new ice sculptures.

Help us help the soldiers and get great discounts at ICEBAR!!!

A NEW BEAR HAS BEEN CARVED

Aaron Costic of International Ice Carving fame, finished a new bear for us yesterday. This is what we have been waiting for!!! It is a 6'5" standing Polar Bear with one paw up, and already has instant success with Icebar Guests. We have moved and updated all the sculptures and added a new shelf for displaying some of the new an amazing vodkas we are featuring. The bear was made from 8 blocks of ice, frozen together starting out at 2,400 pounds! After the carving, I think he probably weighs close to a ton. This is a BIG FELLA.

Aaron started by stacking the blocks and we will get the video up so you can see how it was done. Really fun to watch him work. We also had a film crew from the International Drive Travel website come and take some movie shots. That should be great publicity for us and for Aaron. I am considering going to take a class in carving from Aaron's studio in Cleveland, but have to wait until it is not so darn cold!!!

I am a Florida native, and really don't like much snow... so why am I operating an icebar? Good question! It's FUN, people SMILE when they see it, and it makes me Feel GOOD! Besides, I get to taste test all the new recipes, like the one below.

Along with Diamond Standard Vodka, we have just tasted the 4 Orange Vodka made from Florida Oranges! This is, I believe, the first vodka distilled from Oranges. After the oranges are squeezed for juice the skins and pulp are made into molasses which is distilled to make the great tasting and quite aromatic vodka. We are trying a new drink with our ice glass that has a sugar rim! Then the orange vodka and a splash of fresh limeaid for an "Florida Orange Freeze". YUM YUM.

Here's the bear -and we are designing another bar to be installed in the future! Let us know what you like, and any suggestions.

MOTOWN CLASSIC WEEKEND

Oh, Yeah, it's Florida Classic Weekend November 19 - 21. Icebar has secured some great hosts and sponsors to make every night a great memory.
Thursday, the Motown Mixer with all alumni invited, sponsored by Zeta Phi Beta and Phi Beta Sigma will have a bus running from the Rosen Center to the Icebar starting at 9:00. Friday, the Motown Mash up with DJ David Z and DJ Cize spinning Dance tunes all night. Come and hear your favorite tunes. Saturday!
MOTOWN CLASSIC PARTY - Sponsored by Hennessy Cognac - FREE bottle with every VIP purchase. This is IT! Best party in town, this is the place to show off your wheels and your heels.
Free parking, Free entry for ladies before 11, 2-4-1 Premium for gents, specials all night.

DIAMONDS AND ICE

We are now featuring Diamond Vodka in the icebar and in our VIP packages. If you have not tasted this marvelous brew that is filtered through DeBeers diamonds you must come. We have absolutely the best prices around, and they are a sponsor of Icebar. It is GREAT STUFF! We have a special martini made with white grape juice that will chill you out!

“Our Diamond Filtered patented process is an industry first. We utilize over six hundred cut diamonds of up to one carat in size to purify our vodka. Our innovative process creates vodka with the silkiest and most subtle of palettes and is simply the most exquisite mass market vodka available anywhere. Our filtration system took over three years to perfect. Its yield is 750 carats of liquid elegance since each and every drop has been individually Kissed by Diamonds.” http://diamondbeverages.com/

FREAKY FREEZE

BOOOO! Icebar Orlando has some tricks and treats for this Halloween. The trick is to pick which night you want to party. Friday - Asian/18+ night hosted by Deepvision Entertainment. With $100 and up costume awards and frightning good drinks it is a hopping scene for the younger crowd to party hearty.
Saturday, its our annual Freaky Freeze Bash. All ladies in costume get in free and all costumed guests get free premium drink..... party till dawn with $100 bottle specials and be the VIP to watch. Bottles for best costume, dance and prance till the wee hours.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ICEBAR

October 1, 2008 - Newsflash, Icebar Orlando opens on time! Wow, it was close, but we did it, became the first permanent bar of ice in the United States, even the entire Continent! My partners have said that if we were to try and pick a worse time to open we probably couldn't have hit it better. The economy crashed, the market tanked, unemployment is at all time high, the "r" word became a reality. Travel stopped, vacations were canceled, meetings abandoned, trade shows and conventions at record lows, and the hotels, a wasteland of empty beds.

Icebar Orlando??? We ROCKED! Well, ok, some of it was just plain rocky, but like Rocky, we learned, we leaned, we listened and we Live our Dream. Our thanks to the employees that have helped us make this the "Coolest bar in the USA" and to those who came to see and shared the fun with their friends, our Expedition Guests, You are the Coolest!
If you missed it, we are ONE YEAR OLD TODAY!!!!

So, look out for our TERRIBLE TWO'S! We're on a roll and we're going to keep our cool..

Flair Bartending

Icebar Orlando has been practicing our Flair. We have had Devin from Rockstar Bartenders show us some cool tricks, and we have made up a few of our own. A couple of weeks ago Devin filmed another episode of his bar-tending lessons at Icebar and we wanted to share it with you. He is amazing, has a great smile and I can swear that no liquor comes out when he slings those bottles.

I have almost mastered one small trick, and we are all working on doing what is called "working flair" That means you do it while still pouring drinks for a crowd without slowing down. We have also been practicing good bar-tending skills.

For me, never having been behind a bar until we owned one, it has been a lot of fun learning how to craft drinks. My most recent was a very Classic Martini.

I can truly say I have never had a classic martini, and I LOVE them! Wow, what a difference the skill to pour the right way makes. Here's the recipe, and the technique to do it at home.

Properly chill a stemmed martini glass (that means fill it with ice and water and let it get very cold) then pour out the water.

Put 1/2 ounce of dry vermouth in the glass and swirl it around to coat the inside of the glass, dump it out.

Fill a shaker 1/2 full of crushed ice and add 3-4 ounces of Bombay Sapphire Gin. (I use a pretty large martini glass) Stir for one minute to dilute some of the ice and make the gin very cold. Don't shake!

Strain gin into glass. Take a lemon peel and twist it over the gin to allow some of the oil to fall down on top of the gin. Throw peel away.

Add two olives on a pick. Just two, don't be greedy!!!!

That's it!. The perfume of the lemon oil, the tiny bite of the vermouth and the chill of the Bombay - Awesome!

Note: If you use vodka, it is a gibson, not a martini. The only martini is made with gin!

Now watch Devin make a cosmo - You can do this at home, too. We'll do more classic cocktails this week. Icebar is making a new menu for those of us who don't drink drinks just to be blind drunk - we are reviving the Civilized Cocktail Hour at Icebar. Come join us, especially on Sunday for cool jazz as we "wine" down the week.

Here's the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aBnzUwYbWU