Here’s a tailgating situation you have probably been through before:
Your friend shows up at the tailgate party but his “contribution” to the effort is a 12 pack of Natural Light. Adding to the pain is that it is still warm. You offer him the opportunity to cool off his warm beers in your cooler. While they are getting cold he, of course, helps himself to your expensive imports. You know, because he doesn’t want to drink warm beer and it will take about 45 minutes before HIS beers are cold enough to drink. By the time his beers are ready, he has already downed eight of yours and the only thing left in the cooler is his crappy beer.
Whether that has happened to you or not, you can totally picture it I am sure. If there was only a way to take a warm 12 oz. can and in two minutes make it just as cold had it been sitting in the cooler for hours.
Introducing the Frost Boss.
As you saw in their official video, the Frost Boss is a contraption that spins a regular 12 oz. aluminum can in ice and takes a warm can to cold in roughly two minutes. On top of that, after the can is chilled, there is no fear of the beverage can exploding or bubbling over because the liquid inside gets cold but not shaken up. Sounds crazy, right? That’s what we thought too so we just had to test it out for ourselves.
The Frost Boss sample we were sent is the newest design that includes the official NFL logo and has laces on the side like a football. Obviously they had football tailgaters in mind when getting the product licensed. We took a number of photos of the product which you will find below. Click on the individual images for a larger, more detailed view.
Sure the Frost Boss looks like it works in a slickly packaged video produced by the product manufacturer. Sure the Frost Boss looks good in photos I personally took. But does it really work? We can honestly and without hesitation say, yes. After testing it out a number of times we can easily say the Frost Boss is “Tailgate Approved”. Check out our own video we shot testing the Frost Boss while out tailgating before an Angels/Dodgers baseball game in Anaheim.
There are a number of benefits to the Frost Boss in a tailgating environment. The most apparent is that no matter how warm your beer is, you are only two minutes away from being able to drink it cold. That’s the obvious part. One aspect we really liked is you do not need to use any type of special ice. Ice from your freezer at home works just as well as store bought ice. And the biggest surprise was the lack of foam and mess. You would think a can spinning at 500 RPM for two minutes would explode when you open it but it doesn’t. It’s not magic. It’s physics. If you want a science lesson as to why the Frost Boss cools a can so quickly and without making it foam over, read on.
How does it work?
By spinning the container, convection is introduced to both the inside and the outside of the container. This increases the rate of heat transfer and cools the beverage down at a rate of at least 20 times faster. You may have spun a beer in ice water by hand but that can get boring and tedious. It is the same science with the Frost Boss but much faster and it automates the process for you.
Why does it not explode?
It all has to do with the air pocket. A ‘carbonated beverage’ is one in which carbon dioxide is dissolved in the liquid under pressure (Henry’s law). When the can is opened, the liquid inside starts to equalize with the pressure in the atmosphere, and the CO2 comes out of solution to do so. All carbonated beverages fizz upon opening, but whether they fizz over (liquid comes out of the container) depends on how fast the CO2 comes out of solution.
In order for CO2 to come out of solution, it needs a ‘nucleation site’ to do so. Those nucleation sites can be either gaseous pockets, or an irregularity along the wall. (Look at how a stream of bubbles form on a specific spot on a glass of beer or soda. You can’t see it, but that spot is an irregularity.)
When a beverage is shaken, the air pocket is broken up into millions of small pockets dispersed throughout the beverage. When the container is opened, CO2 in solution has sites all over the place, and it comes out of solution so quickly, that the liquid has no time to get out of the way, and it rises up and out, hence, it fizzes over.
When a beverage is rotated, the air pocket stays intact and knocks all the small bubbles off the side of the container, making one larger air pocket. There are no nucleation sites dispersed throughout, and the usual slow decarbonation takes place at the infrequent irregularities, and at the surface.
Okay, now that you have gotten your science lesson done for the day, the bottom line is the Frost Boss works. You supply the beer and the ice, the Frost Boss provides you with peace of mind knowing you are never more than one to two minutes away from an ice cold beverage. And honestly, if you can’t wait a measly two minutes to drink a beer, you may want to look into rehab centers. (Besides, rehab is for quitters.)
No product is absolutely perfect and we did find one down side to the Frost Boss. The spinning base only fits standard 12 oz. cans. That means skinny cans like Coors Light, Keystone and those smaller energy drinks like Red Bull will not fit. But if that is the only drawback I guess the Coors Light drinkers will just have to plan better to ensure their beers are cold when they arrive.
The Frost Boss is available online for purchase for under $40. For more information or to order one of your own, click: HERE
