These Stainless Steel Chilling Sticks Won't Cool What You Want

As some other cooling hardware coverage this weekend besides the Scythe Mugen MAX CPU heatsink review is a look at two stainless steel chilling sticks that promise to be handy, but in reality come up short.

The other cooling test this slow-news weekend isn't Linux related or even directly related to computers, but many Linux enthusiasts enjoy drinking beer, right? ;) What we're looking at is a two-pack of stainless steel beer chillers. These metal "chilling sticks" claim to be able to cool a warm beer in five minutes that is then "perfectly chilled" for consumption. It's a simple yet great idea, at least in theory.

Two of these reusable chilling sticks retail for about $20 USD but were sent over to Phoronix as a gift/sample with my love for wonderful German/Bavarian beers (among others) being widely known. These sticks are supposed to fit any size bottle, can be then hand-washed, and refrozen for use multiple times. Included with the two stainless steel sticks were just the simple instructions.

Using these beer chilling sticks come down to just tossing them into a freezer for at least four hours, opening a warm beer and pouring off a bit of beer from the bottle to make room for the tube, and inserting the stick into the beer bottle for five minutes. After that, "pour and enjoy a perfectly chilled bottle of beer."

While it's great in theory if you have a warm beer either from picking it up just at a store and being excited to try out the brew, your supply of refrigerated beer is out, or other seldom situations where your beer isn't already cold, in reality these sticks seem to be a waste.

First off, these chilling sticks look more like a sex toy than they do a beer chiller...

Secondly, you waste a lot of warm beer inserting this large stick.

Lastly, in my tests of room temperature beers, the sticks that were frozen for a day at a time did a poor job at chilling the beer... With a 12oz bottle of beer and keeping the frozen stick in the beer for 5~6 minutes, the temperature was about 25~27C in the multiple tests I carried out. This was with the normal US-sized beer bottles too rather than the Bavarian half-liter bottles or larger.

Other issues include having to freeze the sticks again for 4+ hours between use and if not pouring enough beer out each time before inserting the chilling stick it can cause a mess.

Those curious or want to find out more can find these beer chiller sticks for sale at Amazon.com.