Beer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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