Ice Beer is beer that has been chilled until ice crystals begin to form. These briefly became something of a fashion in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Japan in the 1990s.

The cold temperature was said to force a chill haze and other precipitation, which would then settle or be filtered out, supposedly producing brilliantly clear, clean tasting beers, slightly stronger that that which was fermented.The process is an adaption of freeze concentration, also known as freeze distillation. Water freezes at a higher temperature than ethanol does, so the ice in a lightly frozen beer will contain water, but not alcohol. If the ice is then removed, the remaining beer is concentrated. This technique can be used to make very strong beers, some of which are traditional—the German eisbock is among these. See eisbock.

For some years Canadian brewers had been investigating whether freeze concentration could be used to reduce the volume of a bulk beer transported over long distances. The concentrated beer would then be mixed with water and bought back to its sale strength before packaging.

Graham Stewart, who was technical director at Labatt, realized the process was not practical, but thought that the image of “ice” would appeal to Canadian drinkers, especially those who were already concentrating their beers by leaving bottles outside to freeze concentrate them at home. Both Labbatt and Molson (1993) and Labatt (1994) used variations of the technology to bring iced beers to market, beginning the so-called ice wars. These were, in fact, somewhat concentrated, as were the Japanese versions.

American brewers Miller and Budweiser followed on with their own brands—Icehouse and Bud Ice. These generally were simply chilled until they started to become slushy, but little ice was removed and the strength of the beer was raised by less than 1% alcohol by volume. The brewers claimed that this “ice technique” resulted in remarkably smoothness. In reality, the words “ice beer” were simply very appealing and gave marketers free license to send bright shards of ice flying fetchingly across the consumer’s television screens. For a few years, the big American breweries brewed many millions of barrels of ice beer, but consumers eventually seem to have realized that the beer was not notably different and the fad went into decline.