A cold drink is a blessing on a hot summer day, especially you are somewhere that has no access to a fridge, for example, when you are in a campsite on the mountain or a beach. If you love backpacking, camping, or fishing in nature, you'll love these useful tips for keeping drinks cold without a fridge, or even better without ice.
Keeping Drinks Cold without a Fridge
Pre-chill your drink in the refrigerator
If you plan to have a picnic or hiking tomorrow, get the drinks for your trip into the refrigerator the night before to chill the drinks for 24 hours or more.
Use a cooler
Coolers are designed to keep foods and drinks cold for days or even weeks outside without a fridge. If you want to bring some beers and drinks for the beach or a picnic, get a lightweight soft cooler bag; if you need to keep the drinks cold for a couple of days or even weeks, get a hard cooler.
When using a cooler to keep drinks cold, there are some tricks that can make the cooler keep ice longer. First, use large ice cubes so that it will take longer for the ice to melt. Also, adding some salt to the ice can lower the freezing point and keep the ice longer. When packing the drinks in a cooler, try to keep the bottles and cans close to each other to reduce hot air.
Wrap a wet cloth around your drinks
Keeping Drinks Cold without Ice
Put the drinks in cool water
In the days before refrigerators, people cool down wines with cool water. And this works well, especially when you are camping near a brook in the forest or fishing on a river. And if you are on a beach, you can bury a bottle of beer in the sand to cool it down, but remember to keep the bottleneck above ground and visible.
Put the drinks in the coolest place
If you are in a house without a working fridge, there are places with relatively lower temperatures. First of all, the cellar or basement of the house. If the house happens to have a cellar, that is the coolest place of the house to keep your drinks.
It may be a little surprising, but keeping drinks cool in the washing machine is also a good idea. The washing machine can keep drinks from the heat and make them colder than room temperature.
And if you don't have a fridge, a cast-iron pot also comes in handy to keep drinks cold.
