The Popular Drink Cooling Hack That Might Not Actually Work

Does this sound familiar? You arrive home after a long day at your job, or come inside hot and sweaty from weekend yard work, only to find you forgot to put your drink of choice in the fridge. Now, instead of a refreshing glass of cold deliciousness, you're forced to drink your beverage warm or wait for it to chill. To solve this problem, you may have seen or tried the wet paper towel hack that claims to help cool drinks down quickly, whether your favorite beverage is beer, wine, liquor, or your favorite flavor of hard seltzer. But does this trick actually work?

Many people swear a wet paper towel is the easiest and fastest way to cool a drink, so much so that outlets like Business Insider have declared it a de facto method to swear by. To try this hack, all you need to do is wrap a wet paper towel around a bottle or can, then pop it in the freezer for 10 to 15 minutes for a beer or 20 to 30 minutes for wine. Voilà! You have a nicely chilled beverage. However, while many anecdotal stories claim this hack works well, there's also some discourse about whether the wet paper towel trick actually cools drinks faster. So, let's take a look at the evidence.

Simply put, while this is a popular hack online, in reality, a wet paper towel probably won't help your drink cool any faster than it would without the paper towel wrapped around it. Although there is no official scientific research on the topic, a few home scientists have stepped up to test the theory.

One of these tests was done by a software engineer with a passion for myth-busting. In his experiment, the engineer found that when comparing two bottles of beer cooling in the freezer, there was no distinguishable difference in end temperature between the bottle wrapped in a wet paper towel and the regular beer bottle with no paper towel. Popsugar, while not a science-oriented outlet, also did a similar experiment with the same end results.

However, this doesn't mean that the hack doesn't work at all. When Greg Blonder of the blog Genuine Ideas conducted his own experiment on cooling larger bottles wrapped in a wet dish towel, he discovered the reason the wrapped bottle wasn't cooling faster was because of a lack of air movement. When placed in a commercial freezer with a fan, the bottle wrapped in a wet cloth cooled much more quickly than the bottle without the wet cloth. Unfortunately, most of us don't have large commercial walk-ins at home to make this trick work.

As it turns out, the easiest and fastest way to cool down your drink is one you likely already know: placing your drinks in a bucket of ice water. Genuine Ideas points out that water is a better conductor than air which is why the ice bucket cools more quickly than the freezer. If you want to really speed up the process, however, it's been proven that adding salt to ice water makes it colder and can help chill drinks faster.

All that being said, if you don't want to deal with the mess of a melty ice bucket and still want to go with the freezer, laying your bottle on its side might actually help it cool faster. In fact, according to a physicist who spoke to Bon Appétit in 2019, laying wine bottles horizontally can allow them to chill 50% faster than other methods (though depending on certain factors, your mileage may vary).

Unfortunately, no matter how you spin it, all of these methods require a wait. If you are someone who often forgets to put your drinks in the fridge but doesn't want to water down your beverages with ice, whisky rocks (also known as whisky stones) could be a good option. These stones are meant to be kept in the freezer and then dropped in a glass of whisky to chill the liquid without watering it down. So, maybe if warm drinks are a common problem in your household, a set of whisky rocks could be a useful tool.