Product Review: Vacu Vin Rapid Ice Cooler

This product claims to be able to cool a bottle of beer in 5 minutes.

Sort of, but not really.

I’ll confess to feeling a bit duped by this one. The instructions indicate that after storing the rapid ice cooler in the freezer for six hours you can then place it around a bottle of beer and cool it in five minutes.

The devil is in the details here folks. The instructions don’t specify exactly how much colder the bottle will become as a result of being wrapped in this little icy vest. I tried it with a room temperature bottle of Cinder Cone Red and after just over five minutes I poured the bottle to find it wasn’t quite as cold as I typically like my Cinder Cone.

My plan for this product in the future is to use it as a wrap for bottles placed temporarily in the freezer – you know, for those times when you bring home room-temperature beer and want to sample it right now. Wrapping this little gizmo around the bottle, then placing it in the freezer should speed that process a bit.

Another use: I bashed my knuckle over the weekend and this thing came in handy as an ice pack to keep the swelling down.

I won’t be buying more of these – one is enough.

Beer Cooling Alternatives

Here’s a quick-cooling method suggested by Dumb Little Man. Hmm. Doesn’t seem so dumb to me. He even thought of cooling beer and “soda.” Evidently MythBuster’s did a segment on this and proved it works. The ice apparently changes the freezing temperature of the water that surrounds the beer thus driving the….oh, I don’t know, they proved it works, okay?

There’s also a video tip floating around the Net showing how to cool down a can of beer in about 30 seconds using a can of compressed air. It might work, but it’ll end up costing you a fortune in compressed air.