Coming to an Ice Cream Shop Near You: Soft Serve Beer

Cazekiel writes "Sticking a mug in your freezer to ensure a cold beer may be made obsolete, if the Japanese brewing giant Kirin has anything to do about it. How? Kirin came up with a way to create frozen beer foam, dispensed the way you would a soft-serve ice cream cone. Gizmag gives us the details: 'To make the topping, regular Ichiban beer is frozen to -5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit) while air is continuously blown into it. It's kind of like when a child makes bubbles in their drink, except inside a blast freezer. Once the topping is placed onto regular, unfrozen beer though, it acts as an insulating lid and keeps the drink cold for 30 minutes.'" Might make flavorless rice lagers easier to go down, but what about real beer? A hefeweizen under an ice cap on a warm summer afternoon? How about an entire glass full of frozen chocolate stout?

Chocolate Terminator Milkshake

[khr]

How about an entire glass full of frozen chocolate stout?

That reminds me of the McMenamins pubs in Portland, Oregon that serve a milkshake with their Terminator stout in it. It's a delicious combination!

Re:Ice anyone?

[soapdude]

Speak for yourself. I like hoppy beers (well, I like all beers). I like the feeling of not knowing if I just had a sip of beer or I just bit into a grapefruit rind. And no. No sarcasm was intended here.

Shades of a failed experiment

[shogarth]

This reminds me of a time we were in the field and our beer got unappetizingly warm. Due to the kind of work we were doing, we had plenty of liquid nitrogen but insufficient refrigerator space for our liquid refreshments. One evening a member of the team decided he wanted a very cold Guinness and so poured about 250 ml of liquid nitrogen into his glass of beer.

Of course the nitrogen changed state but the surprise (to us anyway) was that the gas caused the beer to freeze sightly slower that it foamed. Within a few seconds, there was a meter or so of frozen beer foam standing up out of the glass. It was completely undrinkable (being in solid form), but wasn't bad if eaten with a spoon; which had to happen quickly as it started to melt immediately.

Moral: Don't send a bunch of twenty-something researchers into the desert for weeks on end without proper cooling equipment.