The Problem: Today, I visited some friends for a football game (Bears V. Saints), and I was in charge of bringing some beer. My local grocery stocks beer (gotta love VA), but the bottles are only slightly chilled. So with traveling time (30 min. in this case), my first beer at the gathering was lukewarm.

My current workaround is to have the foresight to bring a cooler with ice-packs.

The Solution: My IdeaSpark* is to have grocery stores stock disposable six-pack chillers in a freezer near the beer section.

Read on for more details…

*

Imagine the space between one beer bottle and the four cardstock sides of it’s enclosure in a typical six-pack package (a package like in the picture above). If you look down on one bottle from above, it would look like the image to the left, with a yellow bottle, and gray cornerspace.

Now imagine flimsy plastic-enclosed ice-cubes (or long ice-wedges, to be literal) that fit snuggly in each corner, and four of these ice-wedges are attached to each other by a sheet of plastic, forming a flexible tube. It would be somewhat similar looking to the image below (except more space between the little ice-wedges, with the green-wedge attached to the pink):

A person first unflattens a tube, then inserts it around each bottle without even having to remove the bottle from it’s enclosure. This should keep the beer cold (maybe chilling it even more) for at least 30 minutes.

Considerations:

1. The outer part of the plastic tube would be thicker to prevent temperature loss, as well as limit condensation from making the six-pack cardstock soggy.
2. Simple water would be most cost effective, unless some chemist could come up with a cheap version of an alternative liquid that stays frozen longer.
3. The ice-wedge tubes should be sold in packs of 6, of course. Plastic and water is cheap, so it would be possible to sell six tubes for under a buck, no?
4. To reduce the costs even further, the sheets can have advertising on it (for beer companies, cab companies, snack foods, etc).
5. People can throw them away when they are done, or save and refreeze them.
6. There could be a white wine bottle version, and another for the thicker champagne bottle.

Bonus IdeaSpark*: If someone also produced a square cup with a handle (like in this picture), people could use this cup to hold their bottle and chill the bottle by reusing ice-wedges they have collected.

Until this IdeaSpark* gets made, you can use THIS to keep your bottles chilled at home.

*