When the weather is right, there’s nothing quite like a frozen cocktail. In fact, even if the weather is not so good, I’m never really against a frozé or a frozen margarita. Making frozen drinks is always a labor of love that involves lots of ice and a blender and crossed fingers that everything works out OK and you don’t end up with a glass full of ice chunks.

Enter Inoviva and its slushie machine, which offers up a restaurant-style slush experience, a miniature version of the Slurpee/Icee you know so well.

After looking at a photo of the Inoviva, you probably don’t need a whole lot of explanation about what it is and how it works. Dump your ingredients into the barrel (up to 48 oz total), punch a button, and a paddle starts spinning the ingredients around a thick aluminum core, which chills the ingredients to freezing as it swirls. You don’t (and can’t) add ice: The slushie is generated by freezing the liquid directly.

Five preset modes are included (cocktail, wine, milkshake, and more), along with five “thickness” settings. It takes about a half hour to fully slush up, at which point you can dispense your beverage directly into your glass by pulling the tap-like handle. Clean-up is surprisingly easy. There are only three pieces to wash that touch liquid ingredients; a cleaning mode lets you swirl warm water around the cooling element, which then can be simply wiped off with a rag.

I tried a couple of cocktails with the Inoviva — a frozen margarita and an attempt to recreate the frozen Irish coffee I enjoyed at The Dead Rabbit Austin. Mixing up your drink is easy. Getting it to freeze to the right consistency is hard. Really hard, in fact, to the point where I never really got the slushie experience I wanted. Having the right amount of sugar in the drink is what’s key to getting it to freeze — same deal as with making ice cream — and I tweaked my recipes endlessly. (A brix level between 11 and 13 is said to be ideal.) I never quite got there, though. The drinks tasted good and were nice and cold — but they were always more liquid than I really wanted.

At $360, the Inoviva is expensive but seems fair for what it does — or can do, at least. I look forward to experimenting with it more over the months to come… but especially once things warm up.

B / $360 [BUY IT NOW FROM AMAZON]

Inoviva Slushie Machine

$360

8

Rating

8.0/10

BUY IT NOW

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