Posted by
michael
on from the keeping-priorities-straight dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Forget about gigahertz processors, faster pipes, quicker CD burners, etc. The BBC News is reporting on a truly important development: A tap that can pour a pint in just 5 seconds. Bottoms up!!"
Isn't the point of Guinness to pour the beer as slowly as possible? Wouldn't this just cause the beer to foam up more, thus causing you to serve flat beer?
P.S. I'm not a beer drinker, so if any of these questions seem stupid, I'm sorry.
Not just Guiness but any decent beer. The sign of a good publican is a slow draw. I dont want a large head on my beer. If the idea was just to increase the speed it would have justtaken a larger nozel however from the article it states "Rob Hayward, chief executive of the British Beer and Pub Association, said: "It is an innovation which the customers will welcome because they clearly want to be served with good quality in high-volume locations. " So I have to assum eit is a good draw at higher speeds if so then this is very welcome. Now I wonder if the King's head in Sutton Valance will get one?
-- Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you!
In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
Re:Guinness
by
JimmyGulp
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The idea is *just* to increase speed. Its for the pubs (or more likely, "trendy bars"), as pointed out here, where queues become a problem. From the ananonva article, its been done by the people who do Carling, which is a beer for people who don't like their insides very much (personal preference, I hate the stuff), and have both a short attention span and no ability to wait it out patiently at a packed bar.
I want my beer served at 4degC, in 117.5 seconds (or whatever the advert claims), with a little shamrock on the top;)
It's the point for some beers, such as Guiness, and bitters which are often still hand drawn.
I suspect this is for bland lager beers - Stella,Fosters, Carlsberg, Coors, American Budweiser, Carling etc etc.
These are extremely bland mass produced beers and the speed it is delivered to the glass makes no difference to the taste and is so carefully carbonated it doesn't froth up.
This is a minor speed improvement, I've seen these kind of beers served with dual head nozzles that deliver twice the volume and take around 10 seconds to pour.
Even a normal lager pump only takes around 15-20 seconds currently and doesn't fizz up the beer.
I suspect there could be marketing problems with this though. Even though people are aware of the fact they are drinking cheap mass produced lagers, they still like to see it being poured. Having it appear in a glass as if by magic, makes it seem all the more instant, and disposable. It may makes some people question what on earth they are drinking that can be poured that quickly and easily.
-- It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
--Albert Einstein
So I have to assum eit is a good draw at higher speeds
I, on the other hand, assume that the British Beer and Pub Association think that if they can pour more pints more quickly then their members will turn a greater profit (by employing less bar staff or serving more customers, for instance).
This is slightly more impressive than American Slashdotter will be aware. In Britain a pint is an Imperial pint, which is 25% bigger than the pint we use.
I'm somewhat bemused to discover that British pubs are still dispensing pints. We all remember (or should) that scene from Orwell's 1984. Winston Smith, trying to dig up forbidden history, goes looking for a guy old enough to remember The Revolution. Doesn't do him any good. He finds his source, but the man isn't very helpful. Does he care about the downfall of capitalism and democracy? Does it bother him that he now lives under a hyper-totalitarian state that makes Communism and Fascism look positively tolerant? No, he just cares that nobody will sell him a pint of beer. All they have is half-liters (not enough) and liters (too much for his aging bladder).
Didn't turn out that way. I guess Orwell was full of it after all!
Re:The Pint Forever!
by
Pentagram
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm somewhat bemused to discover that British pubs are still dispensing pints.
There's special exemptions in the metric legislation for beer and milk to be sold in pints for cultural reasons.
Re:The Pint Forever!
by
fm6
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Hardly a troll -- you ask some important questions. Do wish you hadn't posted as an AC though.
Just after the big AT&T breakup, my company hired away a Big Name from Bell Labs. Way out of my league, but my office was next door, our jobs overlapped, and we became friends. He had a lot of AT&T manuals in five-ring binders. I asked him why AT&T didn't didn't use three-ring binders like everybody else. He pointed out that AT&T was so big (before the breakup they were the second largest private entity on the planet) that they could set their own standards.
Current parallels to that include Microsoft's ability to resist using w3C and ISO standards, and the U.S. resistence to the metric system. Though they actually did try during the 70s, when you saw road signs that gave distances in both miles and klicks. But consumer resistence rolled that effort back.
Before you sneer at the stupidity of ordinary Americans, consider the difference between Europoe and the U.S. Before the metric system, Europe had a really painful hodgpodge of measuring system. Which varied not just between countries, but between professions. Apothecary measure, troy weight (used by goldsmiths and jewelers), various kinds of freight... The metric system won out not because it was more "logical" but because it was something everybody could agree on. But when you have a couple hundred-million people all using the same traditional system, it's less of an issue.
Which is not an excuse for those NASA contractors who refuse to change over. The scientific and engineering community has been metric for decades. The fact that NASA is unable to enforce standardization on its contractors is a really painful sign of their political feebleness and bureaucratic inertia.
I have to nitpick your claim that we "can't even get the old Imperial measurements right". Here's the history: when the U.S. broke off from British rule, the measurement systems were actually identical. Unfortunately that "system" was a really nasty hodpodge of traditional measures. In 1822, Britain tried to rationalize measurement, not by going metric (evil French-Jacobin invention!) but by inventing a new set of measurements that was easy to verify and close enough to traditional measures to be accepted. Thus the Imperial Gallon was defined as the volume of 10 pounds of water at normal temperature and pressure.
The U.S. continued to use traditional English measure, but finally started to eliminate some of the marginal systems. For volume, we're currently down to two: the English Wine Gallon and Corn Gallon, though we currently call them the Liquid Gallon and Dry Gallon. I supposed it would have made a little more sense to adopt the Imperial system -- but in 1822 that would have been politically impossible, for the same reasons the UK invented the Imperial system rather than going metric.
Re:onto surgical procedures...
by
nastyphil
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"In 1954, Bob Hawke was immortalised by the Guinness Book of Records for sculling 2.5 pints of beer in 11 seconds. Bob later became the Prime Minister of Australia."
It is telling that the system was developed at the behest of one of the worst brewers on the planet. The system is tuned to deliver beer at 2 degrees celcius (that's 36 degrees to my fellow Americans).
As any good beer advocate knows, a temperature of 36 degrees will numb the tongue and effectively kill any sense of taste you might experience while drinking your ale. The system needs to be warmed up by a good ten degrees (farenheit) so we can taste out beer.
Oh, and please leave the frosty mugs behind as well. They are just a gimick and only serve to water my beer down and further numb the taste buds.
Re:Too cold!
by
protoshoggoth
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I suspect that the extremely cold temp helps to keep the beer from foaming when blasted into the glass at this ludicrous rate.
It is telling that the system was developed at the behest of one of the worst brewers on the planet... The system needs to be warmed up by a good ten degrees (farenheit) so we can taste out beer.
So what you're saying is that the beer sucks, but you want it poured at a higher temperature so you can taste it sucking?
Problem Exists Between Pump And Customer
by
tiled_rainbows
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In my (extensive) experience, the bottleneck in English beer-delivery systems is generally the staff. Used to be, when I was a lad, publicans were mature, dedicated professionals who spent their entire life pulling pints. It doesn't matter how long a tap takes to pour a pint if the operator has enough parallel-processing capacity to pour more than one drink at the same time, also, if they are even vaguely competent, they can take your money and put it through the till while the beer is pouring.
Unfortunately, most pub staff (in London, anyway) these days are students or foreign travellers who are just filling in for a feew weeks/months and have no dedication or commitment - they're far more interested in taking cigarette breaks, chatting with their off-duty mates, taking mobile calls whilst working, etc, etc.
I realise this makes me sound like a red-faced old reactionary bigot, but it is one of my pet peeves. It is impossible to over-stress how much of an improvement to my quality of life a general raise in the standard of London bar staff would represent. Faster taps my arse. Let's get some real professionals behind the bar.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the point of Guinness to pour the beer as slowly as possible? Wouldn't this just cause the beer to foam up more, thus causing you to serve flat beer?
P.S. I'm not a beer drinker, so if any of these questions seem stupid, I'm sorry.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Unfortunately, the technology is developed for Carling, which is utter piss.
College students have been doing this for years. Ever hear of a keg stand? How about a funnel?
***
Big deal - the sump pump in my basement can beat _that_.
It's a beer bus that runs at a blazing 0.2 hz!
Ceci n'est pas un post.
Its about time that Slashdot got a section for beer. Perhaps use a logo like this.
I'm somewhat bemused to discover that British pubs are still dispensing pints. We all remember (or should) that scene from Orwell's 1984. Winston Smith, trying to dig up forbidden history, goes looking for a guy old enough to remember The Revolution. Doesn't do him any good. He finds his source, but the man isn't very helpful. Does he care about the downfall of capitalism and democracy? Does it bother him that he now lives under a hyper-totalitarian state that makes Communism and Fascism look positively tolerant? No, he just cares that nobody will sell him a pint of beer. All they have is half-liters (not enough) and liters (too much for his aging bladder).
Didn't turn out that way. I guess Orwell was full of it after all!
"In 1954, Bob Hawke was immortalised by the Guinness Book of Records for sculling 2.5 pints of beer in 11 seconds. Bob later became the Prime Minister of Australia."
Dialectician. Archology.
It is telling that the system was developed at the behest of one of the worst brewers on the planet. The system is tuned to deliver beer at 2 degrees celcius (that's 36 degrees to my fellow Americans).
As any good beer advocate knows, a temperature of 36 degrees will numb the tongue and effectively kill any sense of taste you might experience while drinking your ale. The system needs to be warmed up by a good ten degrees (farenheit) so we can taste out beer.
Oh, and please leave the frosty mugs behind as well. They are just a gimick and only serve to water my beer down and further numb the taste buds.
In my (extensive) experience, the bottleneck in English beer-delivery systems is generally the staff. Used to be, when I was a lad, publicans were mature, dedicated professionals who spent their entire life pulling pints. It doesn't matter how long a tap takes to pour a pint if the operator has enough parallel-processing capacity to pour more than one drink at the same time, also, if they are even vaguely competent, they can take your money and put it through the till while the beer is pouring.
Unfortunately, most pub staff (in London, anyway) these days are students or foreign travellers who are just filling in for a feew weeks/months and have no dedication or commitment - they're far more interested in taking cigarette breaks, chatting with their off-duty mates, taking mobile calls whilst working, etc, etc.
I realise this makes me sound like a red-faced old reactionary bigot, but it is one of my pet peeves. It is impossible to over-stress how much of an improvement to my quality of life a general raise in the standard of London bar staff would represent. Faster taps my arse. Let's get some real professionals behind the bar.
Thanks for letting me share.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!