How long do I keep beer in the freezer?
Especially when it's warm outside and you're thirsty, you need something cold to drink quickly. How long beer can stay in the freezer is then an important question at the latest. Because anyone who has ever been allowed to remove the remains of burst bottles does not want to experience it a second time. So what should you watch out for now?
How long can the beer stay in the freezer now?
If you forget to chill the barley juice or have just bought it, the freezer promises quick cooling. But if that beer If it stays in the freezer for too long, it no longer tastes good and in extreme cases glass bottles and cans burst and cause quite a mess. It doesn't have to be and is relatively easy to avoid if you pay attention to a few things.
- How long the beer should stay in the freezer depends on the one hand on its starting temperature and on the other hand on how cold it is in the relevant freezer compartment. So if you put cold beer from the fresh food into the freezer so that it becomes ice cold, it will freeze accordingly faster than a bottle at room temperature. The content of the freezer compartment also has an influence on this. If you put in several bottles, all of which are at room temperature, the cooling will take longer than if you just put one bottle in.
- If you put a bottle of beer with a capacity of 0.5 l at room temperature in an ice compartment with three stars, you can usually leave it there for up to 30 minutes without risk. Then the beer will be pleasantly cool and not yet frozen. For beer that has already been chilled, you should expect a maximum of 20 minutes. So that you don't simply forget it, set an egg timer or program the time as an alarm in your mobile phone.
- It usually takes a few hours for a bottle of beer to burst in the freezer, unless it is a very powerful device. Then it can also go much faster. But even with a very weak device, such as is often built into small devices as an ice cube compartment, the danger is great if it remains there overnight.
- Get the beer out of the freezer and it's not ice cold enough for you, you can use a trick that is common in the US. Just add ice cubes. This dilutes the good drink a bit, but is very pleasant if you are very thirsty. Alternatively, you can put thick-walled beer glasses or, even better, beer stein mugs in the compartment beforehand. These continue to cool the beer even after it has been poured and, through contact with the lips, additionally reinforce the "ice-cold impression".
One hears again and again that mineral water must not be put in the freezer. …
The causes of the reduced taste when refrigerated
So that you can assess the risk of when you can no longer enjoy your beer for one reason or another, you should be aware of what happens to it in the freezer compartment. It's not the quick cooling that makes the beer lose its taste.
- One reason is that once it starts to freeze, it doesn't happen evenly. The components that make up the barley juice freeze at different rates. If a part is frozen, these components are “missing” in the rest. So when you take a sip of it, you won't taste the beer as a whole, but only parts of it, which are not very tasty.
- Another reason is that almost all of the carbon dioxide is not frozen in during the freezing process, but escapes. If the barley juice then melts again, it lacks it and it tastes rather bland. Low-carbon beers, such as Kölsch, are therefore served in very small glasses for “taste reasons” because they should be drunk relatively quickly. Because even when standing in the glass, the carbon dioxide contained escapes and the beer tastes stale after a while.
