The flavor of whisky generally opens up a little when it's diluted down slightly from the 40 proof (or higher) that's in the bottle. Assuming you use good water (or ice), of course. It's traditional to serve Scotch with a little ceramic water jug; and of course you've heard of "bourbon and branch", i.e., branch water (spring water)? So a little dilution isn't a bad thing.

Store it in the freezer (it's far too high-proof to freeze and explode) and use whiskey stones. Those are the easy ways.

Store in the freezer, and chill your glass before pouring. Pour whiskey, immediately return bottle to freezer of a bucket of ice.

Using a thicker glass helps, as does having a chilled holder or bed for the glass. Basically anything to keep the glass cold.

I've found things like whiskey stones, ball bearings, and whatnot to oddly effect the flavor and the texture of the drink. Much better to just use a thick glass, thoroughly chilled. Whiskey stones and the rest also fail the Altonian test as they are single-taskers.

As others have said, sometimes the best thing you can do to a whiskey is dilute it down a little bit, and I say that as someone who likes most of my drinks neat and room temperature. Depends on the whiskey, your mood, how hot of a day it is, etc. If you do all the above, but pour the whiskey over a single ice cube, you'll only get a little dilution and have very cold amber deliciousness.

A single BIG cube or IceBall...the increased surface area of the ice slows the melting,allowing the spirit to chill without getting watered down. Also...it looks cool.

The shape of the ice will affect it's melting rate (and a sphere has about 20% less surface area than a cube of the same volume), but when you use ice to cool something, the relationship between chilling and diluting are directly proportional.

That is to say that no combination of ice shape, stirring, pouring, or shaking will make any drink colder but less watery than any other method. It only affects the speed at which the heat from the booze is expended to melt the ice.

So the answer to your question is to either refrigerate the bottle or to find a non-reactive chemical that sublimates without altering the drink.

A lot of the bars are now using Cold Draft ice machines which make very large square cubes. These are ideal for serving whisky over. And then if you know a talented mixologist like Andrew Bohrer from Mistral you can always talk him into carving you an ice ball!

But otherwise there are some super cool large ice molds that you can make BIG ice cubes, balls, large squares and long thick spears. One of the biggies will cool your drink without the quick dilution of the standard ice cube.

– Kathy Casey

Several options:

1) Store the whisky/ey in the freezer for a bit before serving.

2) Use the fake plastic reusable ice cubes in a shaker with the whisky/ey and pour it into a chilled glass.

3) Use a martini glass chiller:

Or develop a taste for neat whisky, thus obviating the need for chilling. Get more of teh flavrs and forces you to buy nicer smoother booze.