Need to grab a cool drink fast and all you’ve got are room-temperature beverages?

Well, you can stick it in the fridge and wait … and wait. You can put it in the freezer and wait a little less.

Or you can try a different method, using ice, water and salt.

According to Becky Worley, who authors the Yahoo! Blog “Upgrade Your Life,” that’s the fastest way to cool your beer, soda or other beverage. Worley tested various methods herself. She started by putting a can of soda in the refrigerator, but found that it can take between 45 minutes and two hours to get the drink sufficiently chilled.

She also put a drink in the freezer, with an enhancer: She wrapped the drink in a wet paper towel. “It works the same way that perspiration cools you down: Evaporation draws the heat away from your skin — or away from your drinks,” she said. It will be cooled in 20 minutes. But beware: If you keep it in there longer, the drink could freeze.

Dunking the drink in a tub of ice and water works even better, she found. “Water conducts heat more easily than air,” she explained. “Compare sitting around in a 68-degree room to sitting around in a 68-degree tub and you’ll see what I mean.”

According to sciencebuddies.org, cold air in the freezer and fridge removes heat from the room-temperature drink, but the “molecules in a gas, such as air, are spread out over a much larger volume than molecules in a liquid … If you immerse the can of soda in a cold liquid, then, you would expect that a much greater number of molecular interactions would result.”

At any rate, Worley found that giving your drink an ice-water bath will cool it from 78 to 50 degrees in eight minutes.

But the best solution, she found, was to add salt to the ice water. “Salt has a lower freezing point than fresh water,” she said, “and adding salt to a bowl of ice water actually decreases the temperature of the water.”

After eight minutes in the ice water with salt, the temperature of the drink was 44 degrees — cool enough to make that drink more refreshing when the heat is on.

—JOE GREENE, NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM