Everything above waits for heat to leave through the wall. Ice in the drink does not wait: melting it absorbs about 80 times more heat than warming the same mass of water by one degree, and it happens in the minutes the cubes take to disappear. The cost is that you end up drinking the meltwater. This uses the same drink and the same container you chose above.
This isn't Newton's law of cooling applied to a single average temperature — it's a genuine 2D axisymmetric finite-volume simulation. The can or bottle is divided into a ring-and-layer grid; each cell exchanges heat with its neighbours by conduction (boosted by an empirical correlation that stands in for internal buoyant mixing) and with the environment by convection (natural or forced, using standard Churchill correlations) and radiation (Stefan–Boltzmann). A lightweight buoyancy check lets warmer, lighter fluid rise past colder, denser fluid — the same effect that makes a fridge-cold drink's core stay warmer than its surface for a surprisingly long time.
A 355 mL can starting at 22°C in a 4°C still fridge takes roughly 3 hours to approach fridge temperature — matching the common "give it a few hours" advice almost exactly. Switch to a fan-forced fridge and an 8°C target, and the same can gets there in about an hour. Drop it in an ice-water bath instead, and the target falls in a few minutes — ice water is dramatically more effective than air because water conducts heat away far faster than a breeze ever can.
Water's convective heat-transfer coefficient is roughly two orders of magnitude higher than air's, even still air against forced air. That's why the classic party trick — ice water plus salt, or just ice water alone — beats any fridge for speed, even a fan-forced one. Both baths are in the Environment list, and the salt slider is real physics rather than a gesture: brine follows the measured freezing curve down to the eutectic at −21.1°C, and a 20% bath roughly halves the time to target again.
Usually, yes — and the section above works out what it costs you. Melting ice absorbs about eighty times more heat per gram than warming the same water by a degree, so it acts almost instantly. But the meltwater stays in the glass: taking a 355 mL can from 22°C to 8°C needs roughly 51 g of ice and leaves the drink about 12% water. Two cubes only get you to 13°C. And you cannot go below freezing with ice alone, however much you add — that is what the salt is for.
It depends entirely on how dry the air is, which is why the answer people give is so inconsistent. Evaporation drives the surface toward the wet-bulb temperature, not the air temperature. On a 30°C day at 15% humidity the wet-bulb is about 14°C and the wrap genuinely chills. At 50% it is 22°C and the wrap merely stops the drink warming up. In saturated air it does nothing whatsoever. Pick Wet wrap + breeze and move the humidity slider to see it collapse.
The simulation now tells you, because it models the phase change rather than sailing through it. Your drink does not freeze at 0 °C — a lager goes at about −2 °C, cola nearer −3, wine around −5.5, and neat whisky not until about −27, which is why the freezer never touches it. Alcohol and sugar push the point down and smear it over a range, so you get slush long before you get a solid block.
Set the environment to a freezer and the page will tell you when ice starts forming, when it turns slushy, and when it freezes through — and the timer will tell you in real time, even with the tab in the background.
Because water is the awkward substance that expands when it freezes, by about 9%. A sealed container has only its headspace to absorb that — typically 4% or so — and once the ice needs more room than there is, something has to give.
What gives depends on what it is made of, which is why the warning differs by container. Aluminium is ductile: a can domes its base, bulges, and only then splits a seam. Glass does not yield at all, so a bottle goes from intact to shrapnel with no warning stage, and it is the one the page flags earliest. A PET bottle usually survives by stretching. An open glass cannot burst at all — the ice simply rises.
Because the top of it is not a wall. A sealed can exchanges only heat, through metal. An open glass also exchanges water with the room, and on a cold drink that runs backwards: the surface is below the dew point, so moisture condenses onto it and releases latent heat into the drink. That is the same physics as the ring your pint leaves on the table, and it is a real warming term — a pint takes several minutes longer to chill in humid air than in dry. The humidity slider appears whenever you pick an open vessel, for exactly that reason.
Heat has to conduct (and buoyantly mix) its way from the centre out to the wall before it can leave. Right after you put a warm drink in the cold, the surface responds almost immediately while the core lags well behind — which is exactly why a "cold to the touch" can isn't always cold all the way through yet.
Conduction moves heat between adjacent fluid cells inside the drink. Convection is heat leaving through the container wall into moving air or water outside. Radiation is the (usually small) contribution from the container's surface glowing in the infrared toward its cooler surroundings — included here because it's rarely negligible for a still fridge.
A bottle's neck has far less surface area relative to its volume than a can's cylindrical body, so heat has fewer places to escape from near the top. The simulation models the actual tapered geometry — body, shoulder, and neck — rather than treating every container as a plain cylinder.
Releases in which this page changed, newest last. Derived from the archived copy of every release, not from notes written afterwards — so it reflects what actually shipped. Site-wide passes are left out; they are in the full changelog.