What exactly happens when you don’t refrigerate a drink after opening?
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When a sealed drink comes out of the factory, it has been pasteurized – meaning it was kept at a high enough temperature for a long enough time to kill all (or at least a very high percentage of) the bacteria. It’s also usually very oxygen-poor inside the packaging, which makes it very hard for a bacterial or fungal colony to get started.
When you break the seal on the drink, the atmosphere gets in, oxygen starts dissolving, and whatever microbes are floating around your local air, can get into the drink and start working. Now the spoilage clock has started. eventually, the bacteria will grow to levels which are enough to make you sick.
Refrigeration slows this clock down by a lot. Pretty much all of the stuff that a bacterium does to survive and reproduce, depends on various chemicals moving around in water and bumping into each other, and occasionally bumping into each other in such a way that they connect, or disconnect, in a chemical reaction. And the warmer the water is, the more “Brownian motion” there is, and the more bumping-per-second is taking place. So if you keep the bacteria cold, it takes them a lot longer to eat, grow, and reproduce. Long enough, we hope, for you to finish the whole bottle.
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