Beer

Would you like some powdered beer to wash down that canned cheeseburger?

By Karen Sprey

05:47 August 31, 2009 PDT

Picture the scene: you’ve been trekking hard all day in the great outdoors, enjoying everything nature has to offer. You’ve set up camp and your canned cheeseburgers are bubbling gently on the fire. As you watch the sun sink slowly behind the mountains the only thing missing is a cold beer. Well… (beer aficionados, you may want to stop reading now) Katadyn, the Swiss-based company behind the Trek’n’Eat canned cheeseburger and other high-tech, freeze-dried foods, has developed a world first – powdered beer – to wash it all down with. Read More

Phase change materials for the perfect cup of coffee

By Jeff Salton

17:02 August 24, 2009 PDT

You know how it is … you make or buy that perfect cup of coffee or tea only to have it go cold before you’ve finished because the phone rang or your boss interrupted your break with some urgent assignment. Well, there’s great news for coffee-lovers (and tea connoisseurs). Two German scientists have put their heads together to come up with a hot drink receptacle that keeps your beverage at the perfect drinking temperature for up to 30 minutes. Read More

BeerPaq CarboPouch looks odd, keeps beer fresh

By Alan Brandon

17:46 July 15, 2009 PDT

There’s nothing like kicking back with a cold bottle of beer on, well, any day really. But if Beverage Pouch Group LLC has its way, you may soon be sipping your favorite artisanal ale from a plastic pouch. The BeerPaQ CarboPouch line of beverage packs looks like something astronauts might use to pack their brewskies on the International Space Station, but the manufacturer says they are an ideal container for small craft breweries and micro brewers. Read More

Nitrogen-filled globes set to revolutionize access to fine wine

By Loz Blain

02:57 June 23, 2009 PDT

All wine tastes better once it's aged, right? Wrong. In fact, wine experts say around 90% of wines are released by the winemaker tasting as good as they're ever going to get - and after 6 months of sitting in a bottle, most are deteriorating noticeably. Now, that's a great excuse to fling open your cellar doors, warm up your corkscrew and start drinking - but it's also the key idea behind a new wine storage and dispensing system called N2Wine that could start a revolution in the wine service industry. By keeping each wine completely isolated from oxygen, and at its perfect serving temperature, these racks of "wine globes" allow restaurants to serve a broad selection of their best wines by the glass, confident that even after months or years, every drop will be as fresh as it was the moment the bottle was opened. But will the market accept such a radical departure from the traditional romance of a fine bottle, opened and poured at the table? Read More

The Go Plate – for a balanced diet

By Darren Quick

00:15 June 23, 2009 PDT

Juggling a beer and a plate loaded with appetizers at summer barbecues can become a delicate balancing act. With both hands tied, how do you actually get the food in your mouth without burying your face in the plate? The Go Plate offers a solution by fitting over your drink to free up one hand for shoveling that food in. Read More

Solar powered beer in the sunshine State

By Emily Clark

21:38 January 16, 2008 PST

January 17, 2008 The environmentally conscious Sierra Nevada Brewery in California is taking steps to become partially powered by the sun. A 1.3 megawatt solar system is being installed at the Chico plant in two phases and will provide 34% of the brewery’s power. Read More

The mophie Bevy – the first Illuminator-built product

By Mike Hanlon

May 8, 2007 Mophie today announced the US$15 Bevy, the first product to be released from the highly successful Illuminator project. The mophie Bevy is a multifunctional case for Apple's iPod Shuffle that features a bottle opener and key chain and was designed by a 17-year-old from California. The Illuminator project at MacWorld Expo transformed mophie’s booth into a live community collaboration and creation lab where, over a four-day period, 30,000+ MacWorld attendees were invited to doodle a product concept that enhanced any of the newest Apple products. Concepts were voted on by MacWorld attendees at the show and on mophie.com. Finally, mophie designers and engineers took the winning concepts and developed prototypes in the booth. Read More

The beer-launching mini-fridge

By Mike Hanlon

March 10, 2007 Here’s further evidence that necessity is the mother of invention. Duke University Electrical and Computer Engineering/Computer Science graduate John W Cornwall seems to rejoice in building interesting contraptions but his latest just could be a killer app. He has designed a fridge that gets the beer for you. His beer launching fridge took “about 3 months and several hundred dollars” to build, resulting in the world’s first fully automated, remote controlled, beer-launching mini-fridge. With a “magazine” of 10 cans, his first fridge was controlled by a keyless entry system. Such was the response to a video of the catapulting fridge, there’s now a good chance the fridge will go into limited edition production with a price tag of US$1500. Read More

Draught Beer Dispenser for the home

By Mike Hanlon

December 7, 2006 With beer being the most popular alcoholic drink on earth, it’s quite surprising that it has taken 10,000 years for someone to invent an appliance that will dispense draught beer and keep it fresh indefinitely. The first to do that was Philips with its PerfectDraft, but the company’s development was done in conjunction with Brewing giant Interbrew, so only Interbrew beers were available in the kegs it used. Now a new beer dispenser that is free of exclusive beer company affiliations is ready for market and uses 4, 5 or 6 liter kegs for around 300 beer brands and can also serve chilled wines and soft drinks. Ladies and gentlemen, the Wunderbar! Read More

The Asahi Refrigerator Robot holds and pours six cans

By Mike Hanlon

September 12, 2006 It might seem a trivial and highly specialised application for a robot, but the task of getting another beer that seems to be one that is ideally suited to a robotic servant and that’s exactly what the Asahi Refrigerator Robot does. The little fellow holds and chills six 350 ml cans and at the touch of a button will dispense a can, rip the top off and pour a perfect beer every time. Japan’s Asahi Breweries held a special promotion earlier this year and gave away 5,000 robots via a lottery for participants who had collected 36 seals from special Asahi beer cans. There’s no sign of the robot hitting the market just yet, but there is a video which shows the little tyke doing its stuff. We suspect a 12 can version will be required for foreign markets. Via Gizmodo Read More

The Beerbelly – stealth beverage container

By Mike Hanlon

April 28, 2006 The Beerbelly enables you to take up to 80oz. (2.4 litres) of your favorite beverage wherever you wish ... disguised as a beer belly. Primarily designed to avoid the high price of drinks at sporting events, movies etcetera, and to enable the consumption of alcohol where it’s not allowed, the device is still legally applicable to a wide range of leisure pursuits. The Beerbelly uses an insulated neoprene “sling” and a polyurethane “bladder” worn under your clothing for concealment, masquerades perfectly as a genuine beerbelly, and stays cold for hours! The Beerbelly is not exactly a socially or legally responsible and things could get ugly if you are apprehended, but the Beerbelly web site has thought of all this, offering helpful advice should you be challenged with the device in situ. In such situations the web site has a range of helpful and in some cases quite humourous strategies. Read More

New beer tap pours beer four times faster and increases keg yield by 30%

By Mike Hanlon

July 19, 2005 Beer is big business - the world consumes 150 billion litres of beer annually and in America alone, beer is a US$78.1 billion dollar industry accounting for 54% of all alcoholic beverage sales in dollars. Which is why the TurboTap is such an important invention - the oddly-shaped elongated beer tap pours beer four times faster than existing beer taps at the same time as increasing keg yield by up to 30% and reducing training time to roughly 60 seconds. By increasing the number of customers that can be served in a given time by bar staff, the TurboTap can significantly increase throughput at peak times, and reduce staff numbers across the board. For the customer, it will mean shorter queues and a perfect beer every time. It’s a classic case of recognising the important problem and the founder of TurboTap, 31-year-old Matthew Younkle did just that in seeking out the technology to pour a faster, more consistent beer. Read More

Caffeinated Beer to launch in November

By Mike Hanlon

It had to happen. The success of the heavily caffeinated "energy" drinks such as Red Bull in the tten and twenty-something markets has seen US brewing giant Anheuser-Busch (best known for Budweiser beer) announce a new fruity beer infused with caffeine, guarana and ginseng. Also infused with select hops and aromas of blackberry, raspberry and cherry, the new beer, which will be known as B(E) will offer a lightly sweet and tart taste. B(E) will be priced slightly higher than Budweiser and marketed through local print advertising, point-of-sale materials, bar and club promotions and online programs. B(E) will contain 6.6 percent alcohol by volume. Read More

Draught Beer Dispenser for the home

By Mike Hanlon

Interbrew and Royal Philips Electronics have announced the development of PerfectDraft, a new system which combines a high-quality appliance and consumer-preferred beer brands in light metal kegs, delivering the taste of draught beer in the comfort of one's own home. PerfectDraft is a new type of appliance with a tap handle, internal cooling system, pump, and 6-liter light metal keg. PerfectDraft keeps beer at the optimal conditions and the beer stays fresh for 4 weeks. Read More