Ooops. Just read PeeWee’s clarification on his initial question. Sorry PeeWee, I was assuming you were after something else. Drinking ice cold beer on a boat gets my motor going. You gotta love it.
In terms of your experiment? I haven’t the faintest clue.
K2! I love the idea, I was trying to think of a way to do this without a full scale, 3-day, experiment at the cost of two identical coolers. I’ll try it this weekend and report the results on Monday. Good point to whoever mentioned that the draining water would require something to take its place. I know there are some fairly simple thermodynamics equations that should be able to solve this, but I don’t have my thermo book anymore and haven’t had time to find one. We’ll try the empirical route and see how that goes. And yes, Cnote, my aim is more of a scientific basis than one of how to quickly chill the beer, but thanks for the great advice!
i can’t wait
Ok, thanks for all the great input! I conducted the experiment as suggested by K2Dave on Sunday: I took two identical styrofoam cups, and poked 3 tiny (about 1mm each) holes in the bottom of one cup. In order to simulate the beer, I filled up 2 empty plastic film cannisters with tap water and capped them and placed them in the bottom of the cup, careful not to cover the holes in the one cup. I then placed an equal amount of ice cubes in each cup, filling them to the top. I even weighed each cup to make sure - they were exactly on. I then placed 2 layers of cellophane over the top and sealed it with a rubber band (So I could see what was going on). I placed each cup on a baking rack and sat the whole thing over a plate to catch the water from the draining cup. I left it indoors because I figured the longer the experiment took, the easier it would be to determine a winner. I set my stop watch, pulled up a chair, opened a cold one (being careful not to get too close so as not to affect the microclimate around the cups! :o) and waited…
THE RESULTS: (are you ready?)
Now, I know there will be those who say, “But you did it inside, in real world conditions where the cooler is opened and closed in a hot environment, the warm air will get in and change the results since the water will hold the temperature better.” However, I checked with my brother (I don’t know why I didn’t do this in the first place?), who is a river guide on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and who absolutely relies on a cold cooler during their 15 day floats down the river in the middle of summer when the temp often is over 100degF and there is no resupply of ice. He says you absolutely have to be anal about draining the water from the cooler to make the ice last the longest.
My guess is that the water in the non-draining cooler conducts the heat in from the outside far faster than the draining cooler. Cold water will certainly chill them down faster, but if there ain’t no ice left, the temp is going up! Thanks again everyone! Have a great day.
I will be sure to apply this new knowledge on my next camping trip. I would have thought that leaving the water in would be a benefit, but your observation that “the non-draining cooler conducts the heat in from the outside far faster than the draining cooler” certainly makes sense.
Here’s my WAG:
A slurry of ice and water will have a temperature of around 32 °F, give or take a few degrees. This is more than cold enough for beer. In fact, I think it’s way too cold, unless you’re drinking rotgut (more below). And there are two more advantages to not dumping the water:
Now some may argue that un-melted ice is usually well below 32 °F, and is thus better than ice + chilled water. True, but so what? You don’t want your beer to be that cold anyway, and the heat transfer is VERY inefficient without water.
BTW: If you ARE drinking nasty brew, and thus want it EXTRA cold, add some salt immediately after pouring the fresh cubes into the cooler. Doing that will probably freeze the beer. Which means it will be undrinkable. Which is probably a better situation if it’s a truly nasty brew.