Whether you love camping, or simply tolerate sleeping in a tent just so you can take part in the awesome socialising which happens, you’ll know that a key part of the camping experience is the food and drink (calories don’t count if you’re camping FYI) that go along with your trek into the wilderness.

Solutions To Keeping Drinks Cold

The problem that usually happens is that once you arrive at your chosen campsite and have wrestled with your tent pegs (we’re super jealous if you book a chalet), by the time you get to relaxing, your food and drink can often have become quite warm, even if you’ve brought along a cool box. The warm food issue can easily be resolved, as it’s really easy to fire up the BBQ and get cooking your feast, but what happens to the multiple bottles of beer and cocktail ingredients that will take a while for you to enjoy throughout your trip? Well, we thought we’d try and provide some solutions for you, as we’ve yet to ever meet anyone who likes warm alcohol. 

Freeze Ingredients

If it’s a shorter camping trip, where you’re day drinking and then sleeping out for a single night, you can always add strawberries to a Ziploc bag, bash them with a rolling pin or heavy object, lay them flat and freeze them. You can then use these as dual purpose ice packs which will also come in useful as they start to melt, as you can add them to your cocktails once you get to your chosen camping spot, which means you can create frozen daiquiris and keep your beers cool, all with one easy hack. 

Freeze The Alcohol Bottles

If you’re planning on taking individual ingredients for cocktails, such as bottles of vodka, these are easily freezable in their own bottles. Although the freezing point of vodka is way beyond a normal freezer’s capabilities, you can still freeze spirits so that they’re super chilled and stay cold when travelling with them to your campsite - the vodka won’t need to melt, as it won’t have frozen solid but it should stay super cold for a long time, especially if you place it next to an ice block in your cool box.

If you’re making more elaborate cocktails (why wouldn’t you, you’re on vacay!), which require really lovely fruit garnishes, then this is another neat way of keeping drinks cold. If you’re making something like Sangria, you can chop up your oranges, lemons, cherries and strawberries in the few days before you head out on your trip. Place the chopped fruit into ziplock bags and freeze them, they lay them in the cool box in the same way as we’ve suggested for the crushed strawberries above, and these should stay icy cold for a long time - you can then add them to your Sangria with some ice, and it should stay chilled for hours. Alternatively, it might be easier just to pack some ready-made drinks, so you can leave bottles of spirits and mixers at home and enjoy your trip!

DIY Cool Buckets

Another cool hack that we just discovered last year, was to take an empty bucket or cool box to your campsite, line it with those amazing emergency foil blankets that people use when they’ve been superhuman marathon runners (yeah, we’re totally not marathon runners, can you tell?!), simply fill the bucket with cold water from your campsite washroom and cover the bucket/box with the foil blankets, et voila! Super cold drinks for the majority of your stay! This also works really well if you cover the frozen items in your cool box with the emergency blankets, as it keeps fruit and ice frozen for much longer. 

If taking multiple cocktail ingredients on a camping trip sounds like way too much trouble, you could take bottles of beer for the avid beer drinkers, and bring along our pre mixed range of delicious cocktails which will easily fit into a cool box with no hassle!