This Gigantic Margaritaville Mixer Elevates All My Happy Hours | Reviews by Wirecutter

Oct 31, 2024

By Evan Dent

Evan Dent is a writer covering appliances, vacuums, and sleep products. In his wedding vows, he promised to do the dishes even after he cooks.

How did the Margaritaville Key West Frozen Concoction Maker come into my life? I’m hardly a Parrothead—I love the vibe, but the music never really caught me. (I’ll stick with Pavement’s slacker rock instead.) But in this case, a woman is (partly) to blame.

As my now-wife put together our online wedding registry, filling it with elegant Le Creuset ramekins and All-Clad cookware, I was allowed to give the list one last look and add anything I wanted. Though she had covered most of our bases, enough digging around on Zola’s various category pages brought me face-to-face with the shining holy grail that is the Frozen Concoction Maker, a combination ice-shaver and blender that makes serving frozen margaritas, mai tais, and frosés at home a breeze. And I decided that I (we) must have it.

Though my wife tactfully placed it at the very bottom of our registry, hopefully out of sight to various relatives and family friends, my childhood best friend immediately found it and bought it for us the day he received his invite. Much to my wife's chagrin, it was the first of our gifts to arrive—and eventually it became one of our favorites.

Precise ice-shaving and blending allow you to whip up perfect, endlessly customizable frozen drinks with ease.

I was at work when the Frozen Concoction Maker arrived at our doorstep, and I received a slightly nervous text from my wife along with a photo of it hulking over our small Brooklyn kitchen. As we couldn’t sock it away in the meantime, it stood unused and gleaming until the weekend, when we finally got a chance to break it in.

The first few margaritas—what other drink would you test it out with?—we made with the machine’s automatic shave-and-blend feature, complete with light-up shark-fin progress indicators, were fine, if a bit under-slushed. But we could sense that they could be even better with a couple of tweaks.

The next week, we still followed regular recipes, tuning in the right mix for every variation, such as adding more or less ice to the hopper on the top, forcing more or less blending with the dials on the bottom, and following measurement instructions down to the ounce. After that, we departed from the recipes entirely, finding new ways to surprise each other with every new concoction we could come up with.

What initially seemed like a bit of a one-use plaything was suddenly a consistent source of joy.

The Frozen Concoction Maker works better than its somewhat goofy appearance suggests. The large ice reservoir at the top fits about half a bag of ice at a time, enough for multiple batches of drinks. A reservoir at the back of the machine collects any melt, which is useful when you forget to empty it after a long night.

Though it offers an automatic feature that shaves and blends for you, you can achieve real cocktail artistry by using the manual toggle, adjusting the amount of shaved ice and the blend time based on your preferences.

Whereas some drinks might benefit from tons of shaved ice and a long emulsion (think frosé or margs) other drinks, such as the mai tai, a tiki classic, are better suited to quick blitzes with a different ratio of shaved ice to cocktail mix. (And no more messing around with a mallet and a Lewis bag.)

That level of control, with only a bit of practice, allows you to produce batch after batch of perfect drinks. When you stray from traditional recipes, the machine’s versatility really shines. For example, at my bachelor party, my friend was able to elevate a cocktail based on coffee and Irish cream by holding the blend until a creamy foam head formed. (Just don’t ask him for the recipe; it has been lost to time somewhere in the Catskills.)

At parties both rowdy and more intimate, the Frozen Concoction Maker is a hit, a must-have for the consummate but fun host.

I won’t lie: The thing itself is pretty big, and getting it to fit in our small New York kitchen has taken some maneuvering. It’s also not cheap. However, getting a good blender or an ice shaver—the only way to replicate the Frozen Concoction Maker’s precise blend of ice-shaving and blending capability—would likely cost as much and take up just as much space in your kitchen. (My kingdom for a home bar!)

The Ninja Slushi, which Wirecutter’s kitchen team just tested, looks to be another solid frozen-drink maker around the same price range, though its freezing and mixing process introduces different pain points in comparison with the Margaritaville model’s brute-force process. For example, put too much alcohol in the Slushi, and your drink may not freeze at all.

However, when your recipe is dialed in, the Slushi doesn’t require bags of ice, and it can keep a batch churning for up to 12 hours rather than requiring refills. I haven’t been able to try it out myself, and my wife is likely to accept only one frozen-drink machine in the house at a time, so maybe an in-office head-to-head testing round is in order (anything for the job!).

The Frozen Concoction Maker’s blender also emulsifies rather than chops the ice, protecting the consistency of your shaved ice better than a regular blender. A bit of rough handling on my part led the bottom sealing ring of the blender attachment to break, though I was able to get a replacement part for free under the machine’s warranty, and other replacement parts are available for ordering through partner retailers if, like me, you get a little too excited during the creative process.

That process is the real draw of the machine. It rewards creativity and imbues all my dinner parties, and even weekends at home, with a sense of fun.

When you’re hosting friends, it’s easy enough to give them a beer from an ice-cold cooler, decant a nice wine on the table, or even stir up some martinis to order, but nothing—nothing—will shock and delight them like a perfect frozen margarita.

You don’t even need alcohol to make the most of it. Dry January can be an endless brigade of “social tonics” and mocktails, or you can liven things up with a movie-theater-level Coke-and-grenadine homemade slushy after a particularly long day.

But ideally, you can have a couple of friends over, fire up the grill or pizza oven, serve a round of margaritas, and then let them go nuts with the machine, putting together whatever concoctions your collective imagination (and your bar cart) can come up with.

It’s enough to make even this jaded Brooklynite throw on a Hawaiian shirt and turn on “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”

This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Maxine Builder.

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The Slushi is not perfect, but it’s worth the splurge if a nostalgia-inducing slushy is what you crave.

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