The Bottoms Up beer dispenser can pour up to 44 pints a minute, with just one person using it. Add a few helpers and it can reach 56 pints per minute, not far off one per second. That's impressive enough, but take a look at how the glasses are "poured." The machine fills them from the bottom:

This would be a fantastic addition to English pubs, where the 19 and 20-year old bartenders lack motivation and brains to the extent that one pint a minute is a miracle, and then the glass will be half-filled with foam. And that's if you can get their attention to begin with.

But how does this magical machine work? Obviously, the cups have holes, but how do they reseal? Magnets. The plastic glasses have a floppy fridge-magnet inside, a circle which sticks itself to a corresponding donut-shape strip around the filling-hole. Here's a birds-eye view, grabbed from a video on the product site.

So, the Bottoms Up pumps are fast, can hook up to any keg and – provided you have the rest of your gear clean and properly adjusted - you won't waste beer via foam. But there is an obvious problem: waste of those glasses. Instead of a glass glass, which can be re-used over and over, these are designed to be disposable, to the extent that the little magnetic discs are pushed as an advertising opportunity:

A magnet on the fridge of the American household gets 20 impressions per day per person in the household, making this ad space the most viewed souvenir taken home from a venue. That also means it is taken home from the venue!

Still, who cares about that, right? After all, with beer coming at you at nine-times the normal speed, it's hard to care about anything else.

Bottoms Up [Grinon Industries. Thanks, Mr. Abell!]

See Also: