In praise of room-temperature seltzer

Ice is for penguins; it's time to go cubeless.

A few years ago we took our family of six on a summer vacation to my wife’s ancestral home of Sweden. We got a lovely Airbnb out in the country and arrived to find all of Scandinavia in the grips of a heat wave.

But no problem, the house had air conditioning (a rarity in Sverige) and we could always put ice in our drinks.

Except, we couldn’t.

Image by Égoité, licensed by CC BY 3.0

To my horror, I discovered that the fridge had no ice maker or even trays to make it manually. Gobsmacked, I wondered whether I should call the embassy and beg to be airlifted back to civilization.

After I calmed down we all spent a wonderful week and made do drinking room-temperature water. By week’s end I frankly forgot ice was even a thing.

When we returned home to our brushed steel side-by-side GE fridge and its perpetual cube producing ice dispenser, I found myself confused. I didn’t want ice. And then I started to think about how this ice-maker had cost extra and how it was always breaking and how even when it was working whenever I filled a glass with ice the dispenser would without fail release two extra cubes right after I removed the glass and they would bounce onto the floor and explode into a thousand pieces.

Was all this...necessary? How much time had I spent waiting for this machine to grind out a few cubes just so my precious water was chilled? How many hours collecting ice shrapnel off the kitchen floor?

So I was a convert. I was icing out ice and going commando, water-wise. But then I wondered, how much further could I go? Our house drinks flavored seltzer by the pallet-ful, and of course it's best served on the rocks. But if I no longer needed my regular water frosty, could I feel the same way about the carbonated variety? An experiment was called for.

At first, drinking room-temperature seltzer is disconcerting; it feels unnatural. Your mouth expects a sensation like wintry sparkle and instead gets sleepy bees. But if you push through, eventually you start to experience lofi effervescence. Every sip is like a shot of lemon water with a bass-note hum from Barry White running through it.

Now room-temp seltzer is as normal to me as Taylor Swift at a Chiefs game.

And I'd argue it has increased my productivity, since I can keep a twelve-can sleeve right at my desk rather than making all those exhausting trips to the fridge. Not to mention the environmental benefit of reducing the work of the electricity-hungry ice machine.

I'm not totally over putting cubes in a drink (a tepid Bloody Mary sounds wretched), nor am I seeking to cull all modern conveniences from my life like some off-the-grid homesteader. But it's inescapably true that once you adopt a convenience, your life gets harder if and when you lose it. And it's almost definitely making you either less resilient or dumber. (Drop me and my car a couple of miles from home and take away my Google Maps-enabled phone and my family probably doesn’t see me again until Easter.)

So I'm sticking with my fizzy clink-less lukewarm thirst-quenchers. At least until they make self-cooling cans. It's coming, I'm sure.