Drinking beer and adventures, for better or for worse, go hand in hand. There’s nothing better than enjoying a beer at your destination to commemorate the journey. But sometimes your destination isn’t a hotel on the other side of the planet or a hostel tucked between two bars. Sometimes the destination is on top of a mountain or deep in the forest or an isolated cove miles and miles from the closest pub. If you’ve brought beers to enjoy (hopefully they’re Singhas) then by the time you reach your destination they might be pretty warm after being stored at the bottom of a backpack for hours. So what’s the best way to cool them down?
Toilet paper.
No, really! Wade Shepard of VagabondJourney.com explains his first encounter and the science behind using toilet paper to get your beer cold enough to enjoy:
I found the solution when a group of American geology students offered me a beer at a campsite in Iceland. I, of course, accepted. I was handed a bottle of premium Icelandic micro-brew that had wet toilet paper stuck all over it.
“Why is there toilet paper all over your beer?” I had to ask the students.
“Oh, that is to make it cold,” one of them answered. ” The wet toilet paper causes evaporation which cools the beer.”
I grabbed the beer that was handed to me. The toilet paper was dingleberried all over the bottle, but it was cool. I popped open the beer and took a drink. It was, by all accounts, cold enough to enjoy.
We were camping, without refrigeration, and I was drinking a cool beer in the middle of a field in Iceland.
Why This Works
When a human sweats it is not the excreted water — in and of itself — that cools you. It is this liquid evaporating on the surface of your skin that lowers your body’s temperature. The water — in this case, sweat — requires energy to evaporate, and it takes this energy from your skin, essentially stealing its heat and lowering its temperature in the process.
Apparently, this same principal also works for warm beer or other beverages. Just wrap up the bottles in a blanket of wet toilet paper (or another material that retains water but also allows for it to dry) and wait for the water to evaporate a little. The drier the paper gets (the more the water evaporates) the cooler your beer should get.
So the next time someone whines about how their drinks are going to get cold if they accept your invitation for a toast on a mountain top, just tell them not to harbor any worries: if you have a roll of toilet paper, some water, and a little time to wait, you can have cool beer anywhere.
Beer bottle + toilet paper + water + time + evaporation = cold beer anywhere! Now go try this method out… in the name of science, of course.
Cheers,
Mr. Singha