FOOD NEWS
The Popular Drink Cooling Hack That Might Not Really Work
By Laura Zbinden
The wet paper towel hack allegedly cools down your drinks quickly by wrapping a wet paper towel around a bottle or can and popping it in the freezer.
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.
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.
There's no scientific research on this theory, but a few home scientists have tested it and found no difference in the end temperatures of bottles with and without paper towels.
When Greg Blonder of the blog Genuine Ideas experimented with cooling large bottles wrapped in a wet dish towel, he found that the lack of air movement caused them to cool slowly.
The easiest and fastest way to cool drinks quickly is to place them in a bucket of ice water. To really speed up the process, add salt to ice water to make it colder.