I’m an avowed fan of the Vacu Vin Rapid Ice Wine Chiller, which can take a bottle of white wine from cellar temp to ready-to-drink in under ten minutes, and as a result I had high hopes for Vacu Vin’s Rapid Ice Beer Chiller.

The theory is simple: A cylinder of re-freezable ice packs envelops your bottle, chilling it quickly. The beer bottle version not only shrinks the pack down to 12-oz. size, it also puts a delightful bit of frothy beer art on the exterior to get you in the mood.

Too bad it doesn’t really work all that well. With the reduced surface area and (likely) higher starting temperature of your beer, it takes at least half an hour to get your beer down to a drinkable temperature, and even then it’s dicey. By the time the Vacu Vin got warm to the touch, my beer still wasn’t as cold as I’d have liked it.

Overall this is a fine gadget if you want to keep an already cold beer chilly, but it’s not ideal for quickly cooling down something that’s starting warm.

C / $14 for two / [BUY IT HERE]

I’m a fan of Vinturi’s Wine Aerator, a now much-copied gadget that instantly aerates your wine as you pour it through the device and into your glass. Handy, convenient, and quite the conversation piece.

Seeking to expand its empire, Vinturi has released a version designed for white wine. the Vinturi White Wine Aerator, “exclusively designed for use with white wine.”

Well… OK. I have put the white wine aerator to the test and found it works great. In fact, it works identically well to the red wine aerator, because as near as I can tell, it is identical. The design is the same, the operation is the same, and the end result is the same. The only difference: Instead of a band of black plastic around its midriff, the White Wine Aerator has a white band. It also has a white stand and a white carrying case.

The other issue at hand: You don’t really need to aerate your white wine, to be honest. A few swirls in the glass and you’re good to go with most whites… and I’ve yet to find a white that benefits from aeration at all.

So grab the White Wine Aerator… or the original one from Vinturi. Honestly it doesn’t matter at all.

vinturi.com [BUY IT HERE]

Are your arms wildly misshapen or underpowered for your size, like a T. Rex? If so, you might need Wine Swirl, an automated “wine aerator” that will swirl the living hell out of your fermented grape juice with little more than a flick of the wrist.

Wine Swirl may look a bit scientific because, frankly, it is. It’s the exact same thing used in chemistry labs to mix reagents and potions and stuff: The electrically-powered base includes a spinning metal component; you drop a small rectangular magnet into your decanter (the provided one or your own), and turn the knob on the base to make it go. The swirling action is actually pretty impressive, creating a vortex that extends all the way down to the bottom of the decanter.

Results: Less than a minute in the Wine Swirl will soften up even the hardest, most inaccessible of wines. But is the effect much more impressive than you can achieve on your own by vigorously swirling wine in a big glass for a few seconds? Well, not really. And having to fish a tiny magnet out of your wine (these things are destined to get lost, I’m afraid) with a special metal rod sort of ruins the mystique of your wine experience even more than a screw cap does.

Now having a piece of scientific equipment on your bar is one thing. Paying $150 for it is another… Yeah, it works, but is it worth it? At least watch the video on their website before you judge. Oooooh, a whirlpool!

B- / $150 / wineswirl.com

By now every urban legend fanatic knows what a deadly menace too-hot coffee can be. Between the scorched privates and scaled tongues, it’s a miracle anyone drinks this stuff at all.

How do you get your coffee down to a tolerable temperature without it getting too cold? Brugo’s answer is an elaborate travel mug with a unique lid.

Tighten on the custom lid and turn the dial to “tip and cool” then rock the cup back and forth a bit. The coffee (or tea, or whatnot) fills a special channel in the lid designed to quickly cool the drink. You then drink it normally through the usual sippy-cup-style opening.

If that leaves you with too chilly a drink you can always bypass the channel with the “sip” setting and get full-temperature, scalding-hot coffee.

Brugo sounds great in theory but it’s asking an awful lot of a caffeine-deprived sleepyhead at 8 in the morning. Filling the channel with the rocking motion just the right way is the hard part, especially since you have to do that with every sip you take. If you’re like me, you either get no coffee in the sip channel, or you shake it so hard it flies out all over your hand. And it’s still hot when that happens, folks.

Nice idea, but the execution is too tricky, especially while you’re driving. Works fine, though, if you just use the regular “sip” setting… provided you can actually get the lid off…

Available in about a dozen colors. Holds 16 oz. in an ergonomic chassis.

C- / $20 / brugomug.com

Smoothies for one? Who wants to break out the giant blender, then clean up the mess afterwards, just for a single-serve drink?

Enter Tribest’s Apollo AP-200, a pint-size blender with vessels that let you mix drinks or grind solid objects in single-serve doses.

The AP-200 is so simple it doesn’t even have an on-off switch. The unique design works such that it doesn’t need on. To use it, you load up a cup (four are included, two 1-cup sizes and two 2-cup sizes; two blades — one dry, one wet — are also included) with whatever you’d like, then screw a blade attachment on top, which works as a sealed lid. Turn it over and place it on the blender base and as you press down, it activates, causing the blades to spin. When you’re done, just take it off, unscrew the lid, and drink it right out of the cup — unlike standard blenders there’s no blade at the bottom to get in your way.

The unique design of the Apollo takes some getting used to, but as a blender it works fairly well, chopping down fruit and ice with reasonable success. I especially liked how easy it was to clean up — just two pieces to go in the dishwasher when you’re done, and you don’t even need a separate cup to hold your bounty.

Sure, if your regular blender works well you probably don’t need the Apollo, but for singles, small kitchens, or for stowing under your bar for the one-off frozen drink, it’s a hit.

$40 / personalblender.com [BUY IT HERE]

The Winepod gizmo I used to create my own Chateau de Null may no longer be for sale — a victim of the recession that made $4,500 DIY wine urns a tough sell — but former CEO Greg Snell has a new trick up his sleeve: A $500, stripped-down version that might put (easier) home winemaking in the reach of just about everyone:

“The initial idea was to enable anyone to be a winemaker by creating a teaching system with everything necessary to make wine like a professional,” says Snell. Although the miniature version of the Winepod will make smaller quantities of wine and will be made of cheaper materials (no sleek stainless steel this time around) than the original, Snell says the idea is the same — to allow anyone to crush, ferment and age their own grapes in an all-in-one machine. Unlike the pricey Winepod, the new iteration will sell for less than $500.

It’s a dilemma for some, I suppose: You want to cool your drink down, but you don’t want it to get watery, a big problem with melting ice. Short of chilled-glass contraptions, how do you get the job done?

Answer: Whisky stones.

Whisky stones are real rocks, soapstone cut into cubes to be exact, which you store in your freezer and drop straight into your drink when you want coldness without meltwater. If you’re starting with a warm/room-temperature beverage, they are slow to work and never get things anywhere close to the coolness that real ice does, but they mostly get the job done eventually. If your drink’s already cold and you just want to keep it that way, they work better, but I doubt that’s a huge application here.

The effect is a little disconcerting, I have to say. You are, after all, drinking from a glass full of gray rocks, which is not the most aesthetic way to imbibe. Despite promises to the contrary, the rocks do impart some flavor to the drink. In plain water, you definitely get a chalky flavor and texture in your mouth. It’s not hard to see why — there are little fragments of dust floating in the glass (and yes, I washed them first). In strong drinks these effects may be less noticeable.

Interesting stuff, and since I usually use ice not just for the cooling but for the water inherent to it, too, I probably won’t use these very often. That said, they don’t take up much room in the freezer, they clean up easily, and they’re quite a conversation starter.

Rock on.

$20 for set of 9 / teroforma.com

Reader Paul Moody writes: Is there any real reason to decant a bourbon? There seems to be a good selection of crystal decanters to be found on the market these days, but are they primarily for style and looks?

They are strictly for looks.

Decanting wine is done to aerate the wine and minimize the amount of sediment you get in your glass, but these aren’t real concerns with spirits, which don’t change after they reach the bottle. Yes, a spirit will often “open up” after it’s sat in a glass for a few minutes, but that’s due to  alcohol evaporating. That doesn’t happen in a sealed decanter.

There’s actually a reason to avoid decanters, too: With leaded crystal (which comprises the majority of crystal glassware), there’s serious concern that lead can leach out of the glass and into your spirit. If you’re drinking wine from a leaded crystal decanter over the course of a few hours, that contact’s not likely to be a problem. Leave that whiskey in the decanter for a few years and it may very well become one. The FDA has even said that alcoholic beverages are even more at risk of this happening, with substantial effects seen after just a few days of exposure to the leaded crystal.

You spent hundreds on crystal glasses and quality ingredients and have perfected your perfect cocktail recipe. And now you’re going to stick a plastic straw into it for your guests? Talk about a presentation killer.

Glass Dharma offers an alternative (and it’s even eco-friendly): Glass straws handmade by California glassblowers.

Available in three styles and in a variety of diameters, the straws are all made from Pyrex-type glass and feel extremely sturdy despite their delicate appearance. (Not only are the straws dishwasher-safe, the company recommends sanitizing them therein.)

The “Simple Elegance” style is a straight-up glass tube, unadorned, while “Beautiful Bends” puts a slight kink (about 15 degrees) in the straw about 2/3 of the way up the body. The show-stopper is “Decorative Dots,” which has two colored glass beads fused onto the top of the straw. With six colors available, these straws can be used much like a wine charm to help your party guests identify whose drink is whose. I’ve been checking them out firsthand and really love the way they add to the presentation of a nice drink. (I hear some people even use them for drinking wine… interesting!)

Cleaning brushes and “straw cozies” (hard or soft sleeves) are also available. Hanging onto the cardboard box the straw comes in is also, of course, a good idea. As well, all Glass Dharma straws include a lifetime guarantee against breakage.

Prices vary, but a set of six of the “Decorative Dots” straws will run you $40 (7mm diameter) to $67 (enormous 14mm diameter). That may sound expensive, but a single good wine glass can often set you back that much alone.

Check them all out at glassdharma.com (hit “shop” to check out the various deals).

We’ve covered ice before, but it’s never looked like this.

Check it out: With these unique molds, you can make enormous, completely spherical balls of ice, pattered after the hand-carved ice balls that apprentice bartenders in Japan are forced to create.

With these special ice trays, you don’t need a chisel to create the orbs. Just fill up the bottom part of the mold with water, put the top half of the mold on it, then use a thin stream of water to fill the mold the rest of the way. That’s a tricky proposition, actually — and water gets all over the place during the fill process — but after all the work to get these things made (and, another challenge, out of the mold) the results are quite striking.

You probably won’t make these ice balls every day, but if you’re trying to make a special impression with a cocktail, it’s worth the effort.

The price, alas, is a little nutty for a couple of little pieces of plastic: 16 bucks gets you a set of two (enough for four ice balls).