Beer Hacks: How to make your beers cold – quick! Photo: vladans | iStock | Getty Images Plus The following is an excerpt from Ben Robinson’s book, Hear Robinson’s creative workarounds for when you find yourself a legit bottle opener and his suggested glassware for specific serving temperatures, Every beer drinker has been in the Worst of All Situations: coming home after a long, hard day at the quarry and realizing that (1) you really need to get a cushier job, and worse, (2) the fridge is empty and all the beer in the house is every bit as warm as the freshly used multiblade gang saw from back down at the quarry.
- The Wet Rag + the Freezer Method
- Let’s start with the lowest-effort approach.
- Cold beer ETA: 7 to 10 minutes
Grab your least-gross rag, get it good and wet with cold water, then wring out the excess. The idea is that you want the water to freeze around the beer as quickly as possible. So, if it’s oversaturated, that’s going to be tough. Paper towels can work if you’re in a ragless pinch, but really, a rag or dish towel or even an actual towel is what you want here.
- Once it’s prepped, grab your beer and wrap it up, going once around the can or bottle with the rag/towel, or a few spins with the paper towels.
- Then just toss the beer in the freezer (if you can rest it on a tray or bag of ice, all the better), close the door (crucial step!), and set your stopwatch for 7 minutes (although if your freezer is crammed, it may take 10).
A standard 12-ounce can or bottle may not even take that long, and that time parameter should get a 22-ounce bomber decently chilled as well. When the time’s up, your towel should be frozen somewhat solid and want desperately to stay attached to the bottle. Ben Robinson Photo: Kaitlyn Flanagan
- The Spin It in a Bucket Full of Ice + Salt Method
- Yes, your hand is going to get cold with this one.
- Cold beer ETA: 3 minutes
All you need for this is water; a bowl, bucket, beer pitcher, or other fairly large receptacle to put that water in; enough salt to make all the slugs in your neighborhood uncomfortable; and a hand that likes to spin things/doesn’t mind getting a little cold.
(Note: This is great for hotels, which often don’t have a fridge but do have all the rest of these things, especially if you’re bold enough to ask for a hundred salt packets from room service.) If you remember ninth-grade chemistry class, you’ll remember that protons have a positive charge, electrons have a negative one, and the emergency eye wash is completely hilarious to trick people into drinking water out of.
You may or may not also recall the principles behind boiling point elevation/freezing point depression. The technical definition involves entropy and thermodynamics, sooo, let’s skip all that and say: If you put salt into water, it makes the temperature at which the water freezes go way down.
So, if you put salt into water and ice, it causes the ice to melt, making the whole bath significantly colder than ice plus water minus salt. Which makes your beer cold, if you put it in. It’s the same exact set of principles that make antifreeze work, but since you’ll be drinking the beer, maybe don’t think about that.
There are a couple of key moves to keep in mind here. First, you’re not using a pinch of salt; you need a lot. Like, cups of the stuff. Literal cups! Just dump it in and stir, then add as much ice as you can find. The next is that once it goes into the bath, you need to spin the bottle or can round and round as much as possible, which will accelerate the cooling process and make your hand remarkably cold (you will be a much happier/less frostbitten beer drinker if you do this with a bottle instead of a can, so you can grab and spin the neck outside the ice bath). Beer Hacks by Ben Robinson
- The Fire Extinguisher Method
- It may not be the most cost-efficient approach, but blasting your beer with a fire extinguisher will certainly get it good and cold.
- ETA: 20 to 30 seconds.
The most important thing: You need a carbon dioxide extinguisher, not a monoammonium phosphate version. It works by starving a fire of oxygen, but that same overabundance of CO2 also makes things very, very chilly. This hack is dead simple. You just put the beer in a bucket so it stays in one place (also, holding it would likely prove to be unwise), trigger the fire extinguisher in quick, repeating 1- to-2-second blasts at the beer, quickly rinse it off, and drink.
- Twenty to 30 seconds should do it, depending on the size of the beer.
- All CO2 extinguishers have a “horn” from which the discharge emits, but some have one that’s large enough to rest a beer snugly inside.
- If yours does, definitely do that, as the gas will contact the beer more directly and speed up the cooling process.
Also, do this outside. You’ll see why. Just remember to recharge the fire extinguisher, in case there’s an actual fire, and to put your beers in the fridge more promptly in the future, so you don’t have to keep recharging fire extinguishers. Important note: Fire extinguishers are simple to use correctly and safely, but if you’re not doing that, they can be pretty damn dangerous.
Contents
How long can you chill beer in the fridge?
The Refrigerator – This method is fairly straightforward and often the go-to method for many beer lovers. The biggest downside to chilling your ale in the refrigerator is the time it takes a cool. On average, the typical refrigerator will take anywhere from 7 to 9 hours to bring a room-temperature beer to a comfortable drinking temperature of about 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
How long does it take a beer to get really cold in the freezer?
How Long It Takes to Cool a Drink in a Freezer – We did the same test as the refrigerator, but instead, put 12 beers into the freezer. Compared to the fridge, the results were stunning. In fact, we had to cut the test short as the beer quickly became too cold, too fast — turning into slush instead of liquid. That’s right, starting with a room temperature beer, it quickly cooled to 36 degrees just one hour. In other words, the freezer got the beer colder in one hour than the refrigerator did in the entire test. After two hours, we checked again and the beer had cooled below 21 degrees. Within two hours in the freezer, the temperature dropped to 21 degrees. Bottom line: If you want to cool your beer in the freezer, it will only take about an hour to get it frosty and two hours to start freezing. If you want to chill it even faster, you can, : Answered: How Long It Takes to Cool a Beer in the Refrigerator and Freezer
How long can you put a glass bottle in the freezer?
How Long Can You Put a Glass in the Freezer? – According to everything that we have said up to this point, you can leave an empty glass in the freezer for as long as you need. You should probably make sure that the glasses are not a subject of a sudden temperature change. However, an optimal 30 minutes to about an hour is just about enough for your glasses to get that frosty look.
Does freezing remove alcohol?
Can you make alcohol stronger by freezing it? – No, you cannot make alcohol stronger by freezing it. Alcohol has a freezing point that is lower than water, so when you freeze alcohol, it will still remain at the same percentage of alcohol by volume. The only way to make alcohol stronger is by increasing the amount of alcohol or by adding a higher percentage alcohol.
Freezing alcohol will only make it thicker and more concentrated in texture. Therefore, if you freeze a drink that is 90 proof, you are still left with 90 proof alcohol. In addition, if you are planning on freezing alcohol, it is important to keep in mind that the container needs to be able to tolerate the extreme cold.
Freezing alcohol can put a lot of pressure on the glass, so always use a container that can stand up to the cold temperature.
What does 5% beer freeze at?
What Temperature Does a Beer Freeze?
Alcohol % | Freezing Temperature in Celsius | Freezing Temperature in Fahrenheit |
---|---|---|
4.8% – 5.0% | -1.67 Celsius | 29.0 Fahrenheit |
5.5% – 5.9% | -1.83 Celsius | 28.7 Fahrenheit |
6.00% | -2.06 Celsius | 28.3 Fahrenheit |
6.50% | -2.22 Celsius | 28.0 Fahrenheit |
Does freezing reduce alcohol?
You can use the freezer to chill bottles of alcohol quickly, but for unopened bottles of wine and beer, be careful: if they freeze, unopened wine and beer bottles may burst from a combination of pressure and expansion of the liquid as it freezes, so limit their time in the freezer.