Monday, January 03, 2011

New Gadget Fills Beer Cups From the Bottom


Pouring beer is an art. When filling a glass from the tap, it takes skill to know just what angle to hold the glass at to prevent too much foam, and just where to stop filling to ensure the beer comes as close to the top as possible without spilling over. It’s a bit like getting the perfect pump at a gas station, only far tastier.
This remarkable device is set to start a revolution in how beers are poured, especially at public events like football games. Rather than having one person in charge of filling one cup at a time, and having to take the time to ensure the customer is getting enough beer and not a cup of foam, this invention allows the vendor to casually fill four cups at a time. This is Bottoms Up, a brilliant invention by GrinOn Industries that’s sure to be a hit.
The vendor places the cups on this mechanism and, like magic, the cups fill from below until stopping just a little below the rim: plenty of beer, little foam, no spillage. That’s amazing by itself, but seeing just how fast one can serve multiple beers using this rather than a typical tap is mind-boggling.
The big question, of course, is how it works. You can see from the video that the cups seem to lock into their respective slots before being filled with their payload. There’s a magnet located in the bottom of the cup that can be pushed upward, and falls back into a slot on the bottom when released. When pushed up, the nozzle below fills it with beer. When removed, the magnet bonds to its slot at the bottom of the cup, preventing the beer from escaping. Of course, one imagines that these cups will cost more than your standard cheap-o plastic cup. The neat thing that they’ve done to counter this is to use the removable magnet as a form of advertising; it can be used just like a normal refrigerator magnet and can have a logo or text advertising just about anything, that money serving to cover some of the extra overhead for the special cups.

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