I’m not quite sure what to make of this gadget. It was created by a design firm in Australia, JonesChijoff, working with Edwin Koh and Iqbal Ameer for their Melbourne bar, Biero. It’s called a Beer Vault, and takes bottled beer and transfers it into a draft environment, cooled by glycol and kept under pressure to preserve it using carbon dioxide which they claim maintains its freshness as if it was still in the bottle. It was also designed so the bottle itself can be displayed just below a clear UV-protected tube that stores and dispenses the beer. (Thanks to Andrew M. for sending me the original link.)
And here’s the finished product, behind the bar at Biero bar.
The website at Biero has some additional information.
And there’s also a blueprint there, too.
The website anthill, where ideas and business meet, describes the project like this:
Be able to offer premium beer to punters in a way that hasn’t previously been done. Any beer is now available on tap! But not displayed in an industrial tin-can hidden away, but out ‘n’ proud, showcasing the varying hues of amber.
Syphoning the bottled beer into the BeerVaults and keeping it under the same pressure as was in the bottle before the lid was cracked. It is also chilled via a clear volume of liquid glycol surrounding the beer, which reticulates through a chiller. At JONESCHIJOFF we put simplicity above all else, and this was the simplest yet most effective solution.
Apparently it will keep the bottled beer fresh for about three days, meaning more people could theoretically buy a small amount of a rare beer, without having to open and potentially even waste a whole bottle. So maybe it’s a good idea? I guess time will tell.
And here’s a wider shot of the Biero bar.
Cool idea.
But two words: light struck.
I think that’s why the columns are UV-protected. I don’t know how effective they are, but they did at least address that issue.
Bah, you posted at EXACTLY the same time as I did Jay!!!
Well, it claims the tube is UV protected.
This is an awesome idea! I wonder if it gives the bottled beer the same taste and feel as if it was originally in a keg…
But how does it remove the cap without briefly getting air in contact with the beer?
And what about Cork-finished beers???
I can’t imagine that mere seconds of exposure would have any detrimental effect, especially given that the co2 given off, and the co2 blanketing the beer in the receiving vessel offers some protection. I’ve been doing it on a homebrew level for years, carefully emptying a 3 or 4 1 year old bottles my holiday ale into the current year’s 5 gallon batch (and then actually letting that blended result age in bulk for another 6 to 8 months). In 20 years of doing this, I’ve never had adverse oxidative problems, not even cumulative.
Done with care, and with the protections their system seems to have in place, I doubt it would be an issue.
I just don’t see how taking a bunch of bottles of beer and dumping it in a contraption like that is going to improve the product.
I’m not sure about it either, but I don’t think the point is to “improve” the beer, but rather to present it in a different way, allowing them to sell smaller servings of big bottles, which seems like at least a noble idea, especially when it comes to rarer beers.
The presentation is certainly futuristic. Any place that installs it better have a cellar of rare beer at the ready. Barring that, I think it would be beneficial to maybe have one of the “vaults” in addition to plain vanilla taps but I can’t see the financial sense in going all out with bottled tap beer.