The New Yorker: Sweating and Storytelling in a Williamsburg Sauna

Aufguss: a world championship for twirling a really hot towel.

On the hottest day in New York City in a decade, nearly a hundred people crowded into a hundred-and-seventy-degree sauna in a converted brewery in Williamsburg for the first U.S. National Aufguss Competition. An Aufguss—from the German word for “infusion”—is a ritual sauna ceremony that lasts for twelve to fifteen minutes. A sauna master fills the room with carefully curated scents by dropping snowballs containing essential oils onto hot rocks—the Finnish word for the resulting plume of steam is loyly—and waves a towel to distribute heat through the room. Alonzo Solórzano, the twenty-nine-year-old director of Aufguss at Bathhouse, where the competition took place, likes to say, “My job is to make the room very, very hot. And I like my job.”

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