Earlier this week, I received an email with the subject “Your pic in a pint? NYC first to see Beer Ripples — a machine that prints anything into Beer!” Almost immediately, I thought to myself, Wow, this sounds very dumb. Here is how I arrived at this snap judgement: Beer is a liquid, and the thought of “printing” something on “liquid” seemed weird and impossible.
How embarrassing it is, then, to report that I, in fact, am the dumb one. At a bar on 22nd Street yesterday, I received a demonstration of Beer Ripples, “a hospitality device that can produce any image or message” on beer foam. Here is what I can confirm: It does exactly what it says it will, with better-than-expected accuracy.
The uses of this device are varied. Maybe you want to do some brand promo when you serve beers. Maybe put a sports logo on it when the big game is on. Maybe use it to buy someone a drink. Thanks to the Internet of Things, you can put any picture on a drink that you’ll then put in your body. (The machine costs $3,000, so don’t expect to get one for your kitchen.)
Using the Ripples app, we uploaded a logo for Select All to the machine and then selected it from the inboard touchscreen. Then we put a beer on the platform and pressed a button, the platform rose up, and then a few seconds later it came back down with the logo on it. Even though I was told exactly what happened, I was still like, “Huh, I did not expect that to actually happen.” What a fun feeling it is for technology to surprise you in a good way.
So we had printed our simple site logo. Then we tried something a little more difficult: some selfies. Here is my colleague Madison.
Here is me.
What a silly machine this is! But it totally works and it’s a neat party trick. And it brought me a bit of joy on a Thursday afternoon, and I cannot say that about most technology these days. Thank you, ridiculous beer printer.
