1. Rapid temperature change destroys a beer's flavor, but this could be great for other stuff.

Posted at 5:19PM on May 28th 2008 by sarsface

2. I'm going to cheat.

Posted at 5:34PM on May 28th 2008 by Mike

3. Gravity-fed Jockey box. 50' of 1/4" - 3/8" Copper tubing, coiled around inside a round cooler. Fill it with ice/water/liquid nitrogen. The colder, the better since the greater the delta, the less copper you'll need. Have a funnel on the top, pour your beer. I guess since a spigot is not allowed, replace the spigot with a nipple, and that into a more elegant delivery device.

Homebrewtalk.com go'ers might wanna give this a shot. I can only imagine what Yuri might do here.

Posted at 5:35PM on May 28th 2008 by Seakip18

4. seakip18:

That was actually tried on the mythbusters, they only used salt and Ice water, but the beer still froze on the inner surfaces of the coils, to have it work, you'd probably have to either circulate the beer very quickly, or keep the coils slightly above freezing.

Best of luck either way,

Posted at 5:47PM on May 28th 2008 by Wolf

5. I think they're looking for more innovative ideas than the heat exchangers every mechanical engineering student was forced to build at some point.

Posted at 6:14PM on May 28th 2008 by garrett

6. Ok here is my idea it is a bit long so bear with it, I think it is ace and has commercial potential (as well as stylish nich ;)

Have a number of plates of copper (I would prefer silver but it is unrealistic unless you rich lol). Have the drink poured into a small funnel/resivoir with a small opening at the base to allow the drink to flow out at a controlled speed.

In the copper plates have a channel grooved out circling from the outside reducing itself to the centre of the plate.

The plate would need to be cooled by some form (probly peltier (sp?)).

Each plate would have a copper tube drop the drink from the above plate centre to the below plate outside groove. Also each plate would be reduced in size from the above plate.

After calculating and testing you would come to the required number of plates and the required flow rate to cool the drink to the desired temperature.

At the bottom of the plates you would place your glass and let the drink make its way to your glass.

For bars etc you could have many grooves carved out to allow multiple drinks to be cooled at once without them mixing, at the bottom and centre of each plate have copper pipes flowing the drinks out to grooves/glasses to avoid mixing the drinks.

here is a quick ms paint quick idea of what it would look like;

Posted at 6:59PM on May 28th 2008 by Mojo

7. :S link didn't show so here it is;

http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/3748/ideaok9.jpg

Posted at 7:03PM on May 28th 2008 by Mojo

8. kind of like the things you drop change into in the mall.

Posted at 7:13PM on May 28th 2008 by thegimpster

9. sarsface - how does it destroy flavor? In making beer, changing the temp from boiling to fermentation temp is done as quickly as possible

Posted at 7:21PM on May 28th 2008 by hogiewan

10. Wolf: That Mythbusters episode was the inspiration. That and the huge amount of warm beer around.

Anything with a copper coil used by other teams tended to freeze to the inside and plug the pipe. Using something like that in the -70deg C slurry I've used would be nearly instant. It's a matter of finding ways to tune it so that it goes in hot, but comes out the end, just above freezing.

Believe me, I've competed since the beginning, it's tricky.

Posted at 8:13PM on May 28th 2008 by RenderMan

11. Brewers use jockey boxes all the timewith either copper or SS piping to take hot beer and serve it cold. They use CO2 to push the beer through. Since you'd need a holding chamber to push the beer through, that'd violate the rules. If you are freezing the beer, your coil is in contact with the chilling medium for too long. The solution is to decrease the coldness of your chilling medium or to shorten your coils.

-Mojo

What you described is sounds a lot like a plate chiller/heat exchanger used in conjunction with a pump. Cold water passes through, chilling the plates and then is given to the hot beer going the other direction. Good idea with reducing the sizes.

-The gimpster
It might have to do with how CO2 is absorbed. The hot beer can is ready to release all of it's CO2 at the temperature, but as it cools, the CO2 redissolves into the beer. Super cooling it may instead leave you with a flat beer. Though I doubt you'd lose ALL your carb. Then again, ever open a warm beer then try to cool it? Not tasty.

Posted at 10:55PM on May 28th 2008 by Seakip18

12. I saw that episode of mythbusters. I loved it. This would provide an elegant solution to the warm beer issue that comes with a long night of beer pong in the garage.

Posted at 11:20PM on May 28th 2008 by Tycoon

13. Mojo:

Thats a good idea, but I was thinking, why run from the outside to the inside? why not just alternate them, outside outside, inside inside, and so forth, that way, all your plates would be interchangeable, and be the same size.

Garret:

About the coil system, it can be as complex as you make it, personally, if I was going to build one of these, I'd build a tight coil around a foot in diameter and about 2' tall then build a insulated styrofoam outer and inner sheath that could be be moved down over the coil to add or insulation and thus adjust the temperature. I'd use plain old ice water for the coolant, so as to avoid sidestep the freezing problem altogether (remember, the beer can be in the machine for up to a minute, so as long as you've got allot of pipe you probably don't need a super cold water bath to get it down to 38). Also, I'd add some paddles or something to circulate the water, to keep the water around the coils from warming up too much.

True, using a coil and water bath is pretty much the standard engineering solution for this sort of thing, but I'd be surprised if someone came up with something within the rules that beats it for cost or effectiveness.

Posted at 12:58AM on May 29th 2008 by Wolf

14. Idea 1: a supercooling apparatus in which you moderate the flow rate with temperature censors. Use plastic tubing immersed in ice bath.
Idea 2: alternating heat/cold sections. Because the rate of temperature change is more or less proportionate to the difference of the two temperatures, it can be designed such that liquid that is too cold will be heated more than cooled, and vice versa. Horribly inefficient, but there might just be some effective designs. (You could also try simply heating the liquid to 90F or whatever the max is and then dumping it through your LN setup.)
Idea 3: Fill the cooler with a matrix of metal beads, pre-cooled to minimal temperature at which beer is in its liquid phase. This creates a huge surface area for contact/cooling. As long as the mass of the matrix is much larger than whatever you pour through it, it should be able to handle cooling the liquid to the matrix's approximate initial temperature.
Idea 4: a supercooling apparatus in which you inject the beer with antifreeze. With any luck, the rule-makers did not stop to think anyone would be crazy enough to come up with a solution that rendered the end result toxic. :P

Posted at 3:36AM on May 29th 2008 by sackofcatfood

15. Actually - I do like warm beer. I'm British, and we make tasty stuff here that doesn't need to be cooled to be refreshing.

Posted at 5:39AM on May 29th 2008 by Ian M

16. Why not try this:

Take a long spiral tube of copper, and put it into a pvc tube. the beer runs from top to bottom, so find a thickness of copper tubing that gets all the beer through in just under the time required.

Then take a big-ass keg of ice cold water, and gravity feed it through the pvc piping from bottom to top. Its a simple counter-current system, and should get the beer to 0 celius with no freezing issues.

Posted at 3:14PM on May 29th 2008 by Dr-Mephesto

17. Heh, crazy Brits.

Why not take an air conditioning approach, to avoid freezing problems? Compress the beer (does it count as a "container" if you're just sealing, then unsealing, the tubes?) so it heats up more, then cool it to just above freezing, then decompress it and serve. During decompression it will cool itself! Ehhhh????

Posted at 1:15PM on Jun 5th 2008 by James