Last month, the Dodgers introduced a frozen beer foam machine, made by Japanese beer company Kirin. It is possibly witchcraft.


The foam is beer, pure beer, agitated in a machine and flash-frozen to 23 degrees and swirled atop your glass or cup. The idea is to act as insulation, keeping the liquid beneath cool on a hot day at the ballpark, beer garden, or rooftop bar. The folks at Food Beast took it for a test run this weekend at Dodger Stadium, and produced the above video.

The process essentially breaks down into 2 easy steps for a bartender, or in this case a newbie Dodger Stadium employee. Step 1, pour the beer out of the tap. Normally, I would add ‘Tilt The Glass!,’ but because you’re essentially topping the bear with frozen head anyway, it doesn’t really matter in this case. Step 2, conjure your skills as a frozen yogurt employee because adding the frozen foam is aesthetically similar. We put the frozen foam to the test and it did in fact keep our beers pretty cold for a few innings and the full thirty minutes. We didn’t test the foam under multiple scenarios, but it seemed to work pretty well in the late afternoon/early evening on a sunny, yet humid, 80+ degree day in Los Angeles.


Zagat also gave the beer foam a try. While it worked to keep their beer cold, there was one noticeable drawback:

In theory, this is a really fantastic idea, but when we tried one the other day at Chaya's Summer Beer Garden, the only thing that foam did was keep us from drinking our icy cold beer fast.



The foam is a lot stiffer than you'd expect, and the best way to get around it, we found, was to poke a hole in it, even if we still got foam on our nose....Once the foam started to melt - and it does, very slowly - it moved a bit allowing the beer to flow freely.

The final verdict appears to be somewhere between nuisance and gamechanger. Even if your hand warms the beer from below, the foam will cool down that ever-important next sip. But at the same time: you're basically drinking really foamy beer.