Ice makers for a home bar

Ice is the one bar supply you cannot buy better versions of in advance. Everything else — the glasses, the tools, the bottles — waits patiently on a shelf. Ice has to be made, and if you are making it in freezer trays you are rationing it, it tastes like your freezer, and it is cloudy. A countertop ice maker is the cheapest single upgrade that makes a home bar feel like a bar, and it is the piece almost everyone buys a year later than they should.

There are three real decisions here: what shape of ice you want, whether the machine needs to store ice or only make it, and whether it sits on a counter or under one. Get those three right and the rest is brand preference.

Ice shape is a drinks decision, not a preference

• Nugget (chewable, 'Sonic') ice — soft compacted flakes that absorb a drink and are genuinely pleasant to eat. The right ice for sodas, iced coffee, cocktails served long, and anyone who grew up on it. It melts fastest of the three, which is the price of its texture. This is the category people search for by name.
• Clear cube ice — slow-frozen, dense and transparent, melting slowly with almost no dilution. The right ice for spirits served neat-over-ice and for anything you want to look good in a photograph. Clear-ice machines freeze in layers and take longer per batch.
• Bullet / cloudy cube ice — what the $60 countertop machines make: hollow cylinders, cloudy, ready in 6 to 10 minutes. Nobody's favourite ice, and completely fine for a cooler, a highball or a crowd. The value is remarkable.

The spec that disappoints people: storage

Almost every countertop ice maker is a maker, not a freezer. It produces ice into an insulated basket, and because the basket is not refrigerated, that ice slowly melts back into the reservoir and gets re-frozen. That is not a fault — it is how the category works — but it means you cannot fill a countertop machine in the morning and expect a full basket at 7pm. Read the output figure as "pounds per 24 hours while running", and plan to run the machine during the event rather than before it. The handful of models that genuinely hold ice say so explicitly, and they cost more.

Countertop or undercounter

A countertop machine needs a flat surface, a power outlet and a jug of water; you pour in, you scoop out, you tip the reservoir when you are done. An undercounter machine is plumbed to a water line, drains to a pump or by gravity, fits a 15 or 18-inch cabinet opening, and makes three to five times as much ice per day without being touched. The step up is large: both the price and the installation. Undercounter is the right answer when the bar is built-in and permanent, and the wrong answer for a bar cart.

The mistake buyers make: buying on headline output and ignoring the reservoir. A machine rated 38 lb per 24 hours with a 1-gallon tank will stop and wait for you to refill it long before it approaches that number. For parties, tank size and whether it takes a side tank matter more than the rated output. The second mistake is descaling — every machine here needs its cleaning cycle run on schedule, and the ones that get thrown away at 18 months are almost always the ones that never did.