If you grew up reading comic books like I did, you might be inclined to call CupCooler the Anti-Ember. Whereas Ember mugs keep your drinks hot, the soon-to-be-Kickstarted CupCooler makes your beverages frosty, fast.
CupCooler is a new project from Dutch design firm, Allocacoc. The small device is a roughly five-inch cube that weighs 15 ounces. Plug the CupCooler directly into an outlet, pour a little water into the accompanying aluminum container and set your lukewarm can or bottle inside of it. A company spokesperson told me that it will cool a drink from 35 °C (95 °F) down to 15 °C (59 °F) in ten minutes.
You may wonder: why not just pour the drink over ice, which will cool it down much faster? A few reasons: ice can dilute your drink and there are certain beverages (like beer) that you might not want to pour over ice. Plus, the company is really going for an Ember-like experience, where the beverage stays cool for a long period of time so you can stay refreshed while you’re working at your desk. No melting ice means your drink stays cold, without the dilution.
Unlike Ember, however, you can’t manually adjust the temperature, and there is no accompanying app to control the product. In fact, CupCooler doesn’t stop at a particular temperature. It keeps lowering it, though the speed of the cooling slows down quite a bit after a certain point.
CupCooler will launch on Kickstarter on March 14 (Update: CupCooler’s launch was pushed back to April 3), with the earliest backers able to purchase one for $55. Once those are sold out, other backers will pay $65. If fully funded, the company says it will ship CupCooler this July.
Allocacoc says it can sidestep the manufacturing issues that tend to befuddle and hamper other Kickstarter hardware projects because it has its own manufacturing facilities in China. All they have to do is source the raw materials.
As someone who prefers cold beverages to hot ones, and with summer heat fast approaching, I’m interested to see if CupCooler lives up to its promises–and keeps me quenched as I sit back and read a stack of comics.
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