The best coolers for beer: interior height for bottles, honest can counts for cans

The two numbers that decide it

Beer is an awkward shape. Cans are short and stackable; bottles are tall and they tip. So a cooler that is excellent for food can be bad for beer, and quarts tell you almost nothing about which one you have.

The first number is interior height. A standard 12 oz long-neck bottle is a little over 9 inches tall; a 22 oz bomber and a 750 ml bottle both run around 11.5 to 12 inches. If the inside of the cooler is 10 inches deep, every bottle lies on its side, rolls when you drive, and you fish through meltwater for them. Three coolers here publish an interior height over 13 inches.

The second is can count with ice in it. Every maker prints the empty number. YETI is the exception and publishes its own figures at a 2:1 ice-to-can ratio, which is why a 45-quart Tundra is listed at 28 cans rather than 60. Halve any other number on this page before you plan around it.

The five, side by side

Standing bottles upright

The Roadie 24 exists for this. YETI built it tall rather than wide — 13.25 inches of interior height in a 20-quart measured volume — specifically so bottles stand. The side effect is that it is a poor shape for a tray of burgers, which is the trade: a bottle cooler is a tall cooler.

At the other end, Pelican's 50QT Elite publishes a 13.70 inch interior height in a 52-quart box, which means a full layer of upright bottles with ice over the top and a lifetime guarantee printed on the product page. Its conservative 38-can rating is the honest one, not a weakness: Pelican is counting cans the way you will actually pack them.

If the cooler is going to carry both, buy the tall one and lay the food flat on top. A bottle on its side in meltwater loses its label in a day and its cap seal eventually; a sandwich does not care about orientation.

Cans: halve the printed number

For cans the shape question disappears and it becomes pure arithmetic. The RTIC 65 Ultra-Tough publishes 84 cans with no ice and 58 lb of ice as the alternative load — those are the two ends of the same box, and real use is in the middle, so plan on about 40 cans plus a bag. The Igloo Marine Ultra 70 is the outlier: 102 cans by the maker and 114 measured by OutdoorGearLab, at 13.4 lb empty, which is less than half the weight of the rotomolded coolers around it.

What the Marine gives up is the term — Igloo covers hard coolers for 1 year — and the measured hours, at 4.2 days against the RTIC's 5.5. For a cooler that gets filled with cans on a Friday and emptied on a Sunday, that is a trade a lot of people should take knowingly. Our can-count guide runs the quart-to-can table for every size on this site.

Glass, meltwater and labels

Three practical things about beer specifically, none of which appear on a spec sheet.

Do not drain the meltwater. Cold water holds a bottle colder than cold air does, and every drain is a reset of the cooler's internal temperature. The exception is a cooler full of glass going in a vehicle, where the water sloshing is what knocks bottles together.

Glass and rotomolded plastic are a loud combination. A soft divider, a tea towel or the cardboard the case came in stops the chipping. Engel's 65 and the RTIC both have flat interior floors with nothing to brace against.

Beer freezes at around 28°F, which is below the 32°F of a water-ice bath but well within range of a phase-change pack rated below freezing. If you are using ice packs instead of ice, use the 32°F packs with glass, not the 18°F ones, unless you want slush.

Buyer's guide: beer coolers

Measure your tallest bottle, then the cooler

Over 11 inches of bottle needs over 13 inches of interior height with ice under it. Every published interior figure we hold is tabulated in cooler dimensions and sizes, next to the exterior measurement that has to fit your vehicle. The makers publish the figure; the table above collects it.

Buy for the number of cans you drink, not the number that fits

A 65-quart cooler full of cans and ice is a 90 lb object. Two 24-quart coolers hold the same beer and neither one hurts to lift.

Separate the beer from the food

The drinks cooler is opened ten times an hour and the food cooler is opened twice. Splitting them is the single biggest ice-retention gain available at a party, bigger than any upgrade in price.

Favour a threaded drain over a spigot

You will empty this cooler wet and heavy. A threaded plug that takes a hose, like the RTIC's and the Pelican's, beats tipping 40 lb of glass over a drain hole.

Check whether latches and gaskets are sold as parts

RTIC and Engel sell them. Igloo sells some handles. Pelican's parts availability we could not verify on a fetchable page, and we say so on its card. See latch, gasket and drain plug replacement.