Cool Drinks Perfectly With This Calculator
I will never forget the time I asked for ice at Valerie Patisserie. It was a particularly hot day in Oxford, and I took a cola from what looked like a refrigerator, but found it quite cool. The woman working in the cafe went to the small freezer, took out a cold bag (like the ones found in lunch boxes), and reached for a pair of scissors.
I said nothing. I had never seen the inside of a cold compress before, and I wanted to see if the woman followed her plan and squeezed the gel into my glass. Unfortunately, her manager stopped her, found two sad ice cubes and tossed them into a glass, where they were melted by a warm soft drink in a matter of minutes.
I am telling you this story to illustrate the dangers of improperly chilled beverages so you can better appreciate this chilled beverage calculator that was developed by physicist Alvaro Diez and beverage expert Tibor Pal. Using science and mathematics (a field of study sometimes called “physics”), they created an easy-to-use calculator that predicts the amount of time it will take to cool a liquid based on the optimum temperature of that liquid, your cooling method. , the fluid flowing medium and the volume you want to cool. For example: if you want to drink a bottle of red wine left on a hot summer day (about 86 ℉), you will need to stand in the freezer for 54 minutes to get 61 ℉, which, according to the optional sidebar from Díez and Pal, is the ideal serving temperature most red wines.
Diez and Pal also offer cooling touches such as the classic ‘ wet paper towel around the bottle ‘ and a salty ice bath, which is nice. The calculator is most useful for drinks you don’t want to add ice to, like beer and wine, but it’s still fun to experiment with other drinks like juice and soda. As someone who loves to enjoy Diet Coke straight from the can, it’s nice to know that I can turn my soda from unpleasantly warm to perfectly frosty in just 16 minutes.