Within 30 seconds of watching, the genius of this invention suddenly dawns on you: No more waiting in line for beer at the stadium. No more hoping that you can grab a cup without missing a touchdown, no more endless waits while a vendor tops it off with too much foam, dumps it off, re-pours, then dumps it again and again until you're ready to swear off drinking and football.
The Bottoms-Up fills a cup in less time than it takes to pull out your wallet to pay for the darn thing.
"It's magic," said Mike Price, vice president of Grinon Industries, which manufactures the device. "There's a little bit of black magic and sorcery involved."
Actually, the secret is a thin, circular refrigerator magnet that covers a hole at the bottom of the cup. When the cup is placed on the dispenser, the magnet raises and the beer flows in. When the filled cup is lifted, the magnet drops back into place, attaching to a metal rim at the cup's base.
Because the dispenser's simple construction allows hands-free filling (no need to hold a tap handle or tip the cup), a vendor can fill multiple cups at once, or even run off to fetch an order of fries without worrying about an overflow; it shuts off automatically when the cup is filled.
Josh Springer, 28, who invented it, said he came up with the idea "in a daydream." He'd been working as a shop manager at a sign company in Washington state when he began pondering the tedium of pouring beer. Maybe there's a better way, he thought.
"My old man said I couldn't figure it out," Springer said. "Four days later I had a working prototype."
He built it out of spare parts screwed to the top of a TV tray.
