“You’ve Been Iced, Bitch.” The Newest Drinking Trend.

New York Post
June 11, 2010

On a recent evening, the patio at the East River Bar was stacked high with empty Miller High Life tall boys. Sarah Bigelow, a 24-year-old butcher, interrupted her co-worker, Ben Turley, who was deep in conversation with someone else. Grabbing his hand, she slid it into the pocket of her jean shorts. He wasn’t getting lucky. He was getting iced.

“You’ve been iced, b – – – h!” Bigelow jeered.

It was the third time in a week that Turley, the 30-year-old part owner of the Meathook, an organic Williamsburg butcher shop, had been “iced” — made to chug a bottle of Smirnoff Ice — and he gamely followed the rules. Dropping to one knee, he proceeded to slurp the bottle down. The crowd whooped and clapped.

Hipsters are the latest group to get in on the mysterious icing trend, joining frat boys, bankers at Goldman Sachs and other buttoned-up corporate types in embracing the month-old fad which has been spreading virally since it first appeared on the Web site brosicingbros.com in early May.

The trend has even spread to the world of celebrities.

A new Web site called Iceashton.com is offering an unspecified prize to the “first bro” to force Ashton Kutcher to his knee to chug. So far, though, celeb hunters have succeeded only in icing the rapper Coolio, members of the rock band the National and Dustin Diamond, better known as the “Saved By the Bell” super-nerd, Screech.

The only way to guard against being iced is to carry a bottle of Smirnoff Ice with you at all times, so you can “block” your adversarial bro, thereby making him drink two 12-ounce bottles of the malt liquor.

In another of the 12 icings that went down in one week at Meathook, Bigelow iced Tom Mylan, her 34-year-old boss. Echoing a nearly universal refrain about the taste of Smirnoff Ice, he says,

“It’s gross,” then pauses for some deeper analysis. “There’s 280 calories in it and it has a weird milky color. I don’t know how they get that many calories in a 12-ounce bottle.”

While Diageo, Smirnoff’s holding company, would seem the prime beneficiary of the icing craze, it has denied involvement. And marketing industry insiders generally take Diageo’s denial at face value.

“Alcohol-marketing campaigns for huge brands depend on the sign-off of their legal department,” says Abram Sauer, who has written about icing extensively for interbrand.com, a marketing Web site. “Only a completely suicidal counsel would green-light a campaign that encourages dangerous and even illegal use of their product.”

Meanwhile, an in-house memo circulated at the Wieden + Kennedy advertising agency in SoHo cited icing as an example of marketing that was “uniting Williamsburg hipsters [and] lonely suburban housewives.”

The memo, which seemed enthusiastic about the possibility of interoffice icings, included a call to action — “I should remind you that our own, very iceable Keith Cartwright is leaving next week. Do you guys feel that? It’s starting to get chilly in here.” The memo suggested that employees take part in the fun as long as they “abide by the gentlemen’s rules for office icing that no one should be iced Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or before 2 PM on Thursday.”

But Mylan cautions against taking the fad too seriously; he predicts it will burn out by the end of the summer. In the meantime, he says, “I’ve lived in Williamsburg for the last seven years. It’s hard for me to know what’s ironic and what’s not anymore.”

He pauses for a moment.

“I just know it’s funny.”