Awesome Stuff: Bottoms Up!

I know that for our California readers, "patio season" is flexible and its boundaries a matter of taste — but for many of us, and especially here in Toronto, it's a pretty limited window — and it's just starting to open up. With that in mind, here are some crowdfunded projects that aim to solve some of the age old problems of the nice cold one:

The Hop Top

Unlike most drinks, it's pretty imperative that you finish a beer soon after opening it, lest it go flat and stale. That's no huge challenge with the average bottle, but becomes a bigger concern if you've picked up a half-gallon growler of something special. The Hop Top seeks to offer a solution, and not in the form of a plain old cork: it's a two-stage regulator cap that allows you to suck out beer-spoiling oxygen and establish the perfect storage pressure with CO2.

Ice Gold

Recently, so-called "whiskey stones" — stone cubes to be chilled and used in place of ice in whiskey and other spirits, to bring down the temperature without watering down the drink — enjoyed a brief surge of popularity. Unfortunately, as great as the idea sounds, most people who tried them rated them somewhere between "barely useful" and "completely ineffective", which isn't surprising if you crunch the heat-conductivity numbers. But surely there's a better way to accomplish the same thing? According to Ice Gold, there sure is: phase change material encased in steel, further encased in 24-karat gold. They aint cheap, but they seem much more likely to work (and for those who wanted whiskey stones as a statement of style and sophistication... well...)

The ColdCan

The traditional way to keep a drink cold under the summer sun is to keep it in an insulated foam shell or "koozie", possibly one emblazoned with the logo of a sports team and acquired via beer company promotion. At best, these gimmicks will buy you a few extra minutes of cold beer goodness before caving in the face of entropy, which is why the ColdCan aims to update them. The key ingredient? Cryogel, aka silica aerogel, the insulating substance used in space suits and the Mars rover. Yes, it's time to dust off that old marketing hook of "space age technology" and wrap it around your beverage.