Review: Rabbit Freezable Beer and Whiskey Glasses

Flipping toward the crossword in the Sunday paper not long before Christmas, an ad for some puzzling-looking glasses caught my eye. Rabbit, manufacturers of a well-known corkscrew, had introduced freezable beer and whiskey glasses designed to cool your drink and/or keep it chilly. Existing technology—refrigerators for beer, ice cubes for whiskey—already do this, and a question leapt to mind: What problem do these glasses solve? As far as I can tell, the answer is "none."

I texted my brother-in-law Ben to let him know it was beer and cribbage night. I wanted to include Ben in my testing because he's got a fine-tuned B.S. meter and he likes drinking a cold one out of either a glass with a picture of Do Ho on the side or a thick-walled goblet that reads "Beer Drinkers Are Better Lovers."*

Like old-school Pyrex, the Rabbit glasses are made of double-walled borosilicate glass. Those walls encase a water-and-alcohol "chilling liquid" and a fair amount of air, creating the wiggle room to accommodate the state change from water to ice. There's also a black silicone sleeve around the bottom that makes them sound like a plastic cups when you clink glasses.

First up were Rabbit's Freezable Beverage Glasses ($35 for two). We poured a couple of room-temperature Hale's Mongoose IPAs as Ben, a boat refrigeration specialist, started telling me about BTUs, heat transfer and why the would make the liquid inside it cooler. Ben pulled out a copy of Nigel Calder's Refrigeration for Pleasureboats, an industry bible nearly as popular aboard ocean-going vessels as Jimmy Buffett CDs, and reminded me that refrigeration isn't about making things cold, it's about removing heat.

Pointing to a chart on page 3, he explained a BTU (British thermal unit)—the amount of heat needed to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. A pound of ice, on the other hand, needs to absorb only 0.5 BTUs to raise it a degree. The important part, though, is that if it goes through the state change from ice to water, you suddenly need 144 BTUs. That's huge!

What that means, dear imbiber, is that a wall of ice around your drink pulls a lot of heat out of your beer as it goes through that heat-sucking phase change on its way to becoming liquid. In practical terms, however, it meant that in the 20 minutes that we sipped down our 12 ounces of room-temperature beer, it went from a bit too warm, to just right, to a bit too cold, to gone.

The Rabbits had to be cooled down again before the next round. Anticipating this, we had stashed a couple of beers in the freezer at the beginning of our session. We pulled round two from the deep freeze and drank straight from the bottles.

At home, I ran tests. A room-temperature beer (67 degrees Fahrenheit) in a frozen Rabbit glass sank to 41 degrees in 15 minutes. Next, I pulled three Anchor Steam IPAs from the fridge. The beer in the bottle only got warmer, and was 49 degrees after half an hour and 55 degrees after an hour. Poured into a beer stein that I pulled from the freezer, the beer dipped into the high 30s for the first half hour and ended up at 51 degrees after an hour.

To wit, the beer in the frozen Rabbit dipped to a low of 29 degrees in 15 minutes. A circle of amber-colored slush formed around the surface of the beer. Sitting on the counter, it stayed in the 30s for more than an hour. Even more impressive, I poured a 1.5-ounce shot of whisky into a frozen Rabbit Freezable Whiskey Glass ($25 for two) and within 5 minutes it was down to 20 degrees.

Holy cow!

The thing is, 30-degree beer and 20-degree whiskey aren't drinks you want to drink.

Saying I was working on reviewing "a glass" without naming it, I sent an email to California's St. George Spirits master distiller Lance Winters asking what he thought of serving whiskey at a temperature around freezing. His reply? "Why the fuck would ANYONE serve a whiskey close to freezing? That's crazy talk."

The cold, he explained, sacrifices aromatics. If it were up to him, the ideal glass would be tulip-shaped and clear in order to concentrate those lovely aromas and appreciate and learn from its color. He said dilution and a slight bit of cooling (both of which can be desirable) can be done with a large ice cube. My tasting notes from that 20-degree whiskey read "kinda nasty," while a subsequent swig straight from the bottle was "much better."

Similarly, RateBeer recommends against serving temperatures between 32 and 39 degrees Fahrenheit (where cold beer poured into a frozen Rabbit spends its first hour) which, it says, are for "any beer you don't actually want to taste."

Other problems cropped up. When the ice inside of the walls of the Rabbit glasses melted, the liquid sloshed like something from Spencer's novelty shop. Plus, the ice and the silicone sleeve kept me from seeing what I was drinking.

Based merely on temperature, it doesn't make sense to drink whiskey neat (or with a mild dilution) from a frozen Rabbit unless you're looking to mask flavors and get plastered. Then again, a rough measurement reveals that the serving of whiskey featured on the packaging is a four-ounce pour—nearly a triple shot!—so there may be something to that idea.

Beer-wise, warm beer in a frozen Rabbit yielded good results, but is anyone who's really hot to trot for beer going to stare at it for 10 to 15 minutes while it cools and loses fizz? Like that first round with Ben, it was a bridge to the second round which we could pull out of the freezer and drink from the bottle.

* True.