The rules of icing are simple: If you lay eyes on a Smirnoff Ice that has been hidden or otherwise placed for you to find it, you have to kneel and chug the whole thing. The only way you can get out of it is with an Ice Block: If you have a Smirnoff Ice on your person when presented with another bottle, the person who tried to Ice you now has to down both drinks themselves. If you don't have your own bottle and refuse to drink the one you find, you're basically dead to your bros.
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The appeal of the game? There's the opportunity to get creative with your delivery, the high of being prepared and turning the attack onto the attacker. And like so many games, it's just a little something to make you and your friends laugh with the possibility of getting buzzed.
A YouTube video from June 2010 called "How to Ice a Bro" outlines the process. In it one bro waits until after the mailman drops the mail to another bro's house then slides the Smirnoff Ice into the mailbox before calling his bro telling him to check for a delivery, bro. Without skipping a beat, that bro takes a knee and chugs away, proving his true bro-ness. It's one of the earliest recordings still on the internet of an Icing, coming out around the same time as coverage of the game in The Village Voice, CBS News, and The New York Times.
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The rules of Icing were made official in the spring of 2010 when members of Pi Kappa Alpha at the College of Charleston in South Carolina emailed BroBible.com the two key steps. (Most of the sources are anonymous in this early coverage because these were college students trying to enter the workforce without "famous Smirnoff Ice chugger" showing up during a background check. Several folks I reached out to for this piece declined to speak on the record for similar reasons.) From there, those same frat brothers started the short-lived site BrosIcingBros.com where they collected images of, well, bros icing bros. That led to more memification with the now defunct Tumblr You Got Iced and IceAshton.com, a website encouraging people to Ice Ashton Kutcher.
At the 2010 Webby Awards, life imitated art when, according to The Village Voice, Foursquare founder Naveen Selvadurai unsuccessfully attempted to Ice Buzz Aldrin. Within just a few months, Icing grew out of the frat house and into a phenomenon.
Nearly a decade before alcoholic seltzers would become the trendiest booze on the market, Smirnoff Ice, which embodies many of those now-popular seltzer's qualities, was chosen for this challenge because people didn't think it was very good. Foster Kamer of The Village Voice called it "The Only Malt Liquor Drink Worse Than Spilled BP Oil Swept Out of The Ocean." And in a very gendered, extremely 2010 explanation of the game, the staff of the University of Central Florida's newspaper Knight News called Smirnoff Ice a "girly beverage" that "many men find taste disgusting," hence the "bro" classification. (Little did they know, some women and nonbinary folks also hate the taste! We can Ice and be Iced, too! We showed them!)
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At the time, there was speculation that Smirnoff itself was really behind the viral trend, trying to boost sales of Ices a decade into their existence. Jim Edwards of CBS News noted that at the onset of Icing's popularity, Smirnoff's Facebook page posted cryptic statuses that could be tied to the game, like "This summer Smirnoff Ice could crash your party" and "This summer, uncap the unexpected."
In 2019 Smirnoff introduced a similarly suspect campaign. The Cremsiffino (an anagram of Smirnoff Ice) gift box was labeled as a luxury brand wooden hanger on the outside. On the inside? A Smirnoff Ice. The idea was to send these "gifts" to friends so they would unexpectedly unwrap a bottle of the beverage. Last year's Cremsiffino gift was a festive puzzle that revealed a secret Smirnoff Ice in the image once it was assembled. That's a lot of surprise Smirnoff Ices from a company that refuses to talk about Icing . . .
Because the execs refuse to talk about it, it's hard to know exactly how Icing may have affected Smirnoff's bottom line. But anecdotally, this definitely caused the product to reach new audiences. "Guys who would never buy Smirnoff before are even buying it now to shield against attacks," one college junior told The New York Times in 2010. And based on the popularity of TikTok videos highlighting the trend—the hashtag #smirnofficechallenge has more than 36 million views—Smirnoff certainly can't be hurting.
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