HALLOWEEN 2011

HALLOWEEN 2011   

And here is our SCARY staff.  It was an EPIC party.

Click the link to see our Halloween Animoto Video. It was a BLOODY RUSSIAN Night on Friday

Stay tuned for HOWL-O-FREEZE photos

Enjoy and BOOOOOO

SIBERIAN NIGHTS

SIBERIAN NIGHTS
Click this link to go to the latest animated photo memories of FRIDAY @ICEBAR!

The Making of Icebar

This is how you make an Icebar. Icebar Orlando from the "icebreaking" to the opening. Here is how it is done by the world champion ice carver, Aaron Costic. Aaron is coming back to carve a new interior in August for Icebar Orlando..... stay tuned!

Icebar/Fire Lounge

Icebar/Fire Lounge CLICK ON THE LINK TO THE LEFT~
Here is the latest iteration of our Event Sales promo video. THANKS to all those who offered suggestions for improvement. Let me know how you feel now!

Icebar Hosts Hometec Launch

Pele Cortizo-Burgess Joins Grey New York as Chief Strategy Officer

click on this link and read about the launch of Hometec at Icebar! It was a great party, and the best way to promote your business in Orlando.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Icebar Orlando announces ICE BALL 2010.

The coolest NYE party in Orlando, and possibly the entire nation is here! 50 tons of ice, and MORE! New sculptures, an amazing Penguin Pizz luge, Meet "Chip" the new bear.

Eat, Drink, Dance, be Merry.

Go to www. Icebarorlando.com for the rest of the story and join us for a COOL party.

We have the decorations, the lights, the Hottest DJ, the coolest drinks, the Iciest glasses, and the best champagne. Can't find a more luxurious lounge, or hotter Ice Princesses to help ring in the new year.

See you there!

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!!!

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/

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

NEW CARVINGS NEW THEME

This month we are designing the new sculptures and theme for Icebar Orlando. Aaron Costic, our amazing sculptor will be available the second week of September to do 4 days of carving and installation. We are tentatively working on the ANIMALS OF THE COLD as the new theme. We have plans for a replacement polar bear, standing up this time, and some Eskimo's with no faces so you can put yours in for a photo, like this: There are also Narwhales, Penguins, Arctic Fox and Hare, Snowy Owl, Seals of all kinds, and the leopard is my personal favorite (see post below), there are also orca whales, albatross and a lot of other kinds of creatures. What is your favorite? Let us know what you think (other than you think I draw funny!)

We are also offering our liquor partners the opportunity to participate in branding of our sculptures and the new bar. I created a power point presentation, and in doing the research am totally in awe of how many people atually visit our website, see us on television and read about us in blogs and articles. We have, this month, two new videos, one on nbc's Travelscoot and another on an English travel site. We also taped a segment for a new website being developed called The Information Network. We will be taping for ION tv a program called Southern Bike Nights which will feature us in a bike-friendly look at Orlando. We continue to get weekly requests for photos and information and interviews.
The result?? BUSINESS IS GOOD!!!!
For that, we thank our guests, and our great Icebar team.

A VERY GOOD DEED INDEED

JADE EVENTS GIVES BACK TO THE COMMUNITY WITH LOVE

Icebar Orlando is proud to be a partner of Jade Events, who produce a monthly party on the 3rd Saturday of each month. . They do a "grown up" party and have a great following. In July, Ernest Wilson's birthday, and also birthdays of DJ Saxwell and Sophia Jones were cause for a great celebration. We have had White Parties, Black Parties, Anniversary Soire's and great and exciting events each month
The month of August the team is giving back to the community in the greatest party for back to school ever! It will be on Friday, AUGUST 15th.

Lined up for the evening are celebrities The Honorable Tiffany Moore-Russel, and Eryka Washington. The guest of honor is Ozzie Smith who is leaving to attend Harvard University. Ozzie is the creator of Orlando Professionals and we want to send him off in style.

The back to school drive asks all guests to bring a new school supply to assist the teachers and students of Central Florida. Everyone bringing supplies will receive deep discounts on entry and drinks.

Doors open at 9 pm, come, celebrate Central Florida education and bring supplies to keep our children at the head of the class.

To the Ends of the Earth

I went South as far as I could go, it was cool, well actually it was unbelievably cold. This is my story.

In my life travel has been a passion. I have now been officially to 137 countries, and not just to change planes. To experience the culture, to enjoy the differences, and mostly to taste the food and come to know the people. There are some good places I could stay forever, some places with no soul that were challenging just to visit, and some places that lit my imagination like a rocket.

Antarctica! The South Pole! A pure white covering of ice over the very beginning of the earth. The core of Gondwanaland. Frozen mountains, Katabatic winds that blow up to 150 miles per hour, a sky of endless sun and endless dark, and the South Pole space station, in search of the origin of the Universe. Imagine yourself in the midst, all alone in the world's most brutal place. It is the highest, coldest, stormiest, driest, windiest place on the earth, and far away from any civilized life. What would it be like, and what would you be like in it? Would you survive? Would you cope? Would it change your life forever?

In this world of instant gratification, immediate global communication, streaming video of every facet of life there seems not much left to explore, to find, to discover. TV shows fly around the world on a racing adventure, anyone can raft the Amazon, we've been to the moon, to caverns far below the surface, I guess we have been there, done that everywhere.

Or, wait, have we? There is a huge difference between looking at a picture and actually standing in the spot. I think that only in the physical experience can we truly know where we are, and where we are going.

When you put your hand into the water in iceberg alley you can feel what the seals and penguins feel when they swim. You can have your guide yell "Get your hand back in the boat" at the top of his lungs, and wonder why until a leopard seal at least 10 feet long pops up to see where his snack went. PHEW! In a 12' zodiac inflatable boat you are on the water and part of the wildlife. The small motor is a huge attraction for penguins who love to swim and jump in the wash of the propeller, and the leopard seals follow to find their next of the eight penguins a day they eat. As you sit very still on the cold and rocky shore two juvenile penguins come to check you out, nudging each other forward until one thinks that jumping into your lap is a good idea, and you are not sure that he isn't after your eyes - so you shoo him away, gently, and he hops off to tell his parent. You watch with horror as a bird large enough to be a nightmare snatches a baby penguin for its supper. You also watch as the penguins snuggle their young and cuddle their mates.

Reality is not on TV, get out there and see it for yourselves. More on Antarctica tomorrow, then the North Pole!

ICE ICE BABY our Adopted Penguin

Today we are reprinting the letter from Michael Bingham, the correspondant for Ice Ice Baby, our Magellanic penguin. AND we have photos! Ice Ice Baby is sitting on two eggs today, and we'll keep you updated on the progress of our flock. (Hey, are a bunch of penguins a flock?)

Dear Icebar Orlando

Thank you for supporting our penguin adoption programme with the adoption of Ice Ice Baby.

Your adopted penguin is a Magellanic penguin of about 5 years old.

Magellanic penguins are only found around southern South America in Chile, Argentina and the Falkland Islands. Each year we monitor population changes at selected breeding sites throughout their breeding range, and money raised through our penguin adoption programme pays for this work.

See www.seabirds.org/penguinstudysites.htm to see where we work. Click on each link for more information on each of our study sites.

At the beginning of each breeding season we visit our selected study sites and examine each and every nest to see how many breeding pairs are in the colony. This allows us to record any population changes, since Magellanic penguins return to the same colony to breed each year. This work has revealed a 90% population decline over the last 20 years in the Falkland Islands, whilst populations in nearby Chile and Argentina have increased.

As well as population counts, we also monitor all our adopted penguins throughout the season, in order to see how many eggs hatch, and how many chicks survive. By monitoring penguins over a number of years we are able to spot differences in breeding success, and find the causes of population decline.

These studies have shown that in the Falkland Islands, breeding success is much lower than in nearby Chile and Argentina, due to chick starvation in the Falklands. Chick survival in the Falklands is less than one third of that of Chile and Argentina because commercial fishing around the Falklands makes it hard for penguins to find food for their chicks.

In Chile and Argentina, where commercial fishing is banned close to penguin colonies, chicks are fed every 12 to 14 hours. In the Falklands, where there is no such protection from commercial fishing, chicks are fed every 34 hours. The lower abundance of food resulting from commercial fishing means that adult penguins must spend over twice as long finding food to feed their chicks in the Falklands. As a result, chicks in the Falklands receive less than half the amount of food, so few chicks survive, leading to population decline.

In September 2000, members of the International Penguin Conservation Work Group passed a resolution calling for no-fishing zones around penguin breeding sites in the Falkland Islands, as has been done in Chile and Argentina. Unfortunately the Falkland Islands Government have refused to honour this, despite the decline in penguin numbers.

Another potential threat to penguins is tourism, however our studies into the effects of tourism show no differences in breeding success for sites visited by tourists and those which are not. This is good news for anyone wishing to visit their penguin. They can be confident that their visit will not cause disturbance, and that we are monitoring the affects of tourism on penguins.

Our adoption programme runs for one year, although of course it can be renewed each year to follow the same penguin. Magellanic penguins arrive at the breeding sites in September, which is when we begin our monitoring work.

Eggs are laid during October, and chicks hatch during December. Chicks leave in February, but adults that have reared young remain around the breeding site until April.

Between April and September, Magellanic penguins remain entirely at sea, migrating northwards up the coast of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, where the austral winter offers longer hours of daylight and warmer waters.

Throughout the breeding season you will be kept updated as to how your penguin is doing - when the eggs are laid, when they hatch, and how the chicks fare. We will also send you a photo of any chicks.

ICE BAR MARKETING Ice Blue Princess

Advertising and Marketing are part of every product. At ICEBAR Orlando we have had the pleasure of working with some great advertising minds, and we have had the pain of working with some who just thought they were great. After our latest experiment, a real bust, we decided to refine our advertising with what we knew felt good to US. The result? Here she is, our Blue Ice Princess. We'd like to know what you think about her.

While we know that "sex sells", we are also part of the Orlando family of tourist venues and for that reason don't want to be overly suggestive. We did want to show that being at Icebar Orlando is fun and also let guests know that we do have the best Ice Princesses that Orlando can offer. Please give us your comments, we appreciate any thoughts and suggestions. Ice Blue Princess will also be part of our upcoming Ice Princess Calendar, which we are shooting very soon. We have found our photographer, and our Ice Princess team is excited to be part of this opportunity. Just have to find a great publisher to make it happen. We'll keep you posted, and hope you let us know how we are doing.

Taping for FOX 35 News

At the crack of day this morning the Icebar team opened early to meet FOX news 35 Entertainment maven Christine Van Blockland for a live taping of our ICEBAR. This had been scheduled three times, but today there was no news more worthy and we were LIVE.

Omar, the camera guru, set up shop at 6:00 AM. His truck, looking like a van from space, cranked up a tower about 30' tall and snaked wires out to hook us all up to the towers LIVE. Interestingly we OOPS "lost the feed" on one segment, and seems like we were being beamed to a tower in Sanford, which was a little too far, but the Hunters' Creek tower was down, and so we were transferred to the Bithlo tower. I did not know there were so many from which to choose. Omar was truly a one man crew with an amazing array of wires, batteries, microphones, cameras, tripods and other magic gear than seemed to appear and reappear while he effortlessly filmed with a camera that had to weigh 35 pounds. Great job, Omar, and THANK you for making us look good.

Christine Van Blockland, star of Fox 35 Entertainment, and "ASK Christine", is a tiny dynamo. She and our Ice Princess Tristen are the same size, I think they claim to be 5' tall, but from my clogs it looked a little like a "tall tale".

Christine talks, energetically and FAST. She is an upbeat whirlwind at 6 am. First fixing her hair and makeup, she cheerfully let us throw capes over her head and then even asked for an Ice Princess fur headband. (Note to self: Christine would make a great Ice Princess should she ever decide to leave the world of TV). She walked us through the process of being on live TV, and told us she would give us about a 10 second warning... that seemed long enough, and we spent the next two hours mostly waiting for the next shot.

It was fun, we had a good time, and when we were taping inside Christine told our guys at the side bar that since it was morning TV they could toast with the ice glasses, but not drink, because we wanted to be careful not to show alcohol consumption. She didn't tell the Ice Queen, so when it was my turn, Hey! I DRANK! It was water with blue curacao just to show some color, but Sean our Ice Bartender, put real vodka down the luge, so I got my first drink of the day quite early! The one thing that seemed to be a problem was our drink names. We serve Seal Bite, which is red, Thin Ice, which is green, Yellow Snow (you figure it out), and our signature cocktail, Penguin Pizz.

The Pizz part gave them a lot of angst. Christine just could not bring herself to say the word, so she said, hey, the drink comes out like a Penguin PEZ !!! The anchor said HUH!

This was fun, we look forward to seeing ourselves on the news, and you can see it at:
http://www.myfoxorlando.com/dpp/mornings/072109icebar