Japanese Twitter always knows what’s important.

We’ve shared lots of life hacks here on SoraNews24. Most are for emergency preparedness, like how to conserve water in a disaster, or how to make a long-lasting oil lamp out of a can of tuna. Some are just plain useful, like how to safely and naturally repel mosquitos and cockroaches. But none are as important or as life-or-death as the one we are about to teach you:

How to cool a beer quickly!

Because who hasn’t gone to open a beer, only to realize that somebody forgot to replace the one they took out of the fridge? Who hasn’t felt the stomach-dropping, dark despair of being stuck with a warm beer, forced either to drink it like some kind of Neanderthal, or to put it in the fridge and wait several hours for it to get cold.

Nuh uh, no thanks. Thankfully, Japanese Twitter has the answer!

▼ “This is a drunk’s wisdom: To quickly chill a room-temperature beer, wrap it in a wet paper towel and put it in the fridge. In about 10 minutes, it’ll change into a cold beer! Since it takes about four hours for beer to cool normally, this is a pretty quick option.”

That’s right, according to Twitter user Nabekichi (@maple4124), simply wrapping a beer in a wet paper towel and putting it in the fridge for as little as 10 minutes apparently does the trick!

Of course, you can’t believe everything you see on the Internet, so we had to give it a try to see if it would really work. We just happened to have some beers lying around, so we put on our goggles and gloves and geared up for a SoraScience Experiment!

First, we tried it on a small can of Heineken, a popular Dutch beer. We soaked some paper towel…

Wrapped it around the can…

And the put it in the fridge. Easy!

Then we went off to try and solve the puzzling “Spot the difference” picture that we’d found in a kids’ magazine and still haven’t figured out…And before we knew it, it was time to check our beer. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like 10 minutes was enough; it was only just above room temperature! Maybe it would do in a major pinch, but it’s not optimum cold.

No matter though, back into the fridge for another 10 minutes! And off we went to watch some videos of the famous otter YouTuber…

After 10 minutes, the can definitely felt much cooler, but…it wasn’t optimum temperature. It would do if you really didn’t want to wait much longer.

But we wanted a nice cold beer, so we left it in for another 10 minutes. That was the key! After 30 full minutes in the fridge, the can itself felt nice and cold, which we assumed to mean that the beer was cold too. Of course, we had to be sure, in the name of science, so we cracked it open and took a sip.

Yep! It was cold. The trick works! But sadly, it wasn’t as quick as Nabekichi said it would be. That made us wonder, though: did they mean we should put it in the freezer for 10 minutes? As SoraScientists, we had to test our new hypothesis, so we dampened another paper towel, wrapped it around a can, and put it in the freezer.

Since it should get cooler much quicker in the freezer, we set our timer for five minutes, in order to avoid freezing our beer, and went off to play our portable PlayStation Classic. When the timer was up, we checked our beer…and it was cold! It wasn’t that cold, but if we really wanted it fast, it would actually be a decent temperature to drink. But of course, we were in it for a cold beer, so we put that sucker in for another five minutes.

After we browsed some cosplayer photos from Winter Comiket 2018, we went back to check on the beer, and we found that it was the perfect level of crisp and cool! We cracked it open and took a sip….ah! Delicious.

So it seems like the 10 minutes that Nabekichi suggested should’ve been for beers put in the freezer, not the fridge; at 10 minutes, the beer in the freezer came out nice and cool, whereas 10 minutes in the fridge barely managed to get it above room temperature.

Now….what about a tall can of beer, like a Guinness, or a glass bottle of beer, like these Asahi? How long would they take? Our SoraScience Senses told us we had to find out, so we did the same experiments in the fridge and the freezer with one of each.

Surprisingly, both the bottle and the large can had managed to cool as quickly as the small can did in both the fridge and the freezer! It didn’t seem to matter what size the can or the bottle was; both chilled beautifully after 10 minutes in the freezer and 30 minutes in the fridge. There was a little bit of difference between them and the short can of Heineken, however; the Heineken beer did not get very cold after five minutes in the freezer nor 10 minutes in the fridge, but the Asahi bottle and the large Guinness can both felt slightly cool to the touch after the same amount of time.

This blew our minds, but at this point we had opened six beers and a party had broken out, so anything could have impressed us, to be honest. If you want to try it, you might find a difference depending on the type of beer you’re trying to cool, or even with how thick your paper towel is. Ours was very thin, so that might have affected the speed with which the beers got cold. Such an idea calls for more experiments, but we were enjoying the beer far too much to safely do any more science, so you’ll have to try it yourself and see!

This is a great hack for parties, when you’ve just bought a six-pack that wasn’t refrigerated, or for when the power is out, or for whatever reason you have a warm beer in hand. Try it next time you’re in a pinch!

Source: Twitter/@maple4124 via Hachima Kiko
Images © SoraNews24