Enter the Blast Chiller – a new feature in LG Electronics Inc.’s premium refrigerators available later this year – which promises to turn that room-temperature 12-ounce can brew (or soda) frosty in five minutes. Want to chill a bottle of wine? Eight minutes. It’s the same amount of time to cool two cans at the same time.

LG said the new technology blasts the cans with icy-cold air gusts with the power of a jet engine. (This is not a joke.) In order to ensure that ice crystals don’t form, the system gently swirls the cans while the cold air blows.

The ShaKoozie combines a beer koozie with the shower. Velcro lets you attach the koozie directly to the shower wall, so you never have to be without your Silver Bullet. It’s so crazy it just might work! $10

Ali Spagnola’s Power Hour Drinking Game Album is a shot glass and USB thumbdrive in one. The thumbdrive contains 60 drinking songs, all a minute long. The idea is you consume one shot — of beer — each minute, letting the music be your guide. After an hour you’ve downed five full beers and, presumably, you’ll have quite a story to tell. I’ve normally heard this done with 100 minutes and 100 oz. of beer — which sounds far, far crazier. $30

Ideas on what it is? Post ‘em here.

The original Vinturi Wine Aerator is controversial enough: The idea is that you pour wine through this plastic tube, air gets sucked in, and the wine spits and dribbles out the bottom. It’s loud and a bit messy but it basically works: Tannic wines (or anything needing decanting for reasons other than heavy sediment) do benefit from a spin through the Vinturi. It’s a marginal improvement, but it’s an improvement nonetheless — and enough to merit giving a Vinturi as a gift to the wine nerd who has everything.

Now Vinturi has another idea up its sleeve. After a silly detour into white wine decanting (come on, people), the company has designed a Vinturi for travel use. That’s right, just slip it in your purse and boom, you can aerate away at The Olive Garden.

While the Vinturi Travel is basically just a shrunken version of the same product (though it looks like a resizing mistake, the photo below is accurate), it suffers from a few flaws that make it less purchase-worthy than the original. First, the size change leaves it with a tiny opening at the top. It’s tough to get a perfect pour into that opening without making a mess — though the Vinturi Travel is still plenty messy as it is.

It is also still quite loud, loud enough to turn heads from a table away as people wonder what the hell that slurping noise is. And yeah, that really is the rub: Is anyone really going to use this thing away from the comfort of their own home? Let me put it this way: The kind of wine you’d drink at an establishment where this would be acceptable wouldn’t be the kind of wine that needed aeration.

B / $36 / vinturi.com [BUY IT HERE]

The idea behind the vessel is, in the company’s words: “Sliz cups are a new drinking product designed to eliminate the cringe between taking the shot and reaching for the chaser.”

In practice, the Sliz cup is a plastic martini glass with a straw attached via the stem. Here is how it is meant to be used: Booze goes in first, and a chaser goes in second. When you drink the concoction, you get all the booze first, via the straw, then the chaser immediately follows. The idea is that you get no delay between the two, making it easier to suck down that shot — as long as you don’t stop in the middle of your sip.

This is, as promised, an “easy” way to do shots, but it suffers from a couple of obvious flaws: The most obvious one is that there is simply no dignity in drinking this way. If you are over the age of 21 and are not in a sorority, there’s really no excuse for using a Sliz. It is, in essence, a beer bong for hard alcohol. Not exactly “discriminating,” no. (Plus I have no idea how you wash the thing.)

That said, it does seem to work as advertised: If you can’t handle the two-second delay between, say, downing a tequila shot and sucking on a lime, well, this is one way to put them together in one incredibly goofy package. Or, I guess you could just have a margarita.

$20 for three glasses / sliz.com

My quest took me from my freezer to New England and back again.

Some say the world will end in fire. Some say it will end in ice. I hope it’s the latter. Finding a good ice cube to chill your cocktail is hell enough as it is.

Wired has the rest of my adventure in all its glory…

Wine Wipes are not a new idea, but they are a new implementation of that idea: Using many of the same ingredients in tooth-whitening formulas, Wine Wipes are little, circular, fabric pads infused with stain-scrubbing ingredients designed to get rid of those purple stains on your choppers.

The advantage of course is immediacy: A tiny pack of Wine Wipes in your pocket, purse, or glove compartment means the stain has less time to set, contrasted with the hours you may have to wait before you can get to a toothbrush. The tiny packet of 20 wipes even includes a built-in mirror so you can check your work.

Wine Wipes contain a whole bunch of active ingredients, including baking soda, salt, hydrogen peroxide, calcium, glycerin, and orange blossom. In use, you’ll taste the salt and the soda, though Wine Wipes are not unpleasant and can come across as quite refreshing — if a bit awkward should you attempt to use one in public.

And the results? Well, my teeth are prone to staining — whitening toothpastes don’t help — and Wine Wipes didn’t do much for me, either. I tried using one within minutes of sipping a number of wines at a tasting and noticed only the slightest improvement in tooth stainage. Your mileage may vary, of course, and I expect if whitening toothpastes work for you, Wine Wipes will too.

Great stocking stuffer for the wine drinker in the family.

$9 for a pack of 20 / winewipes.com [BUY THEM HERE]

Good question, and I’m happy to share.

For spirits, I almost always use one of three glasses: The Glencairn Scotch Whisky Glass, the Riedel Sommeliers Series Single Malt Whisky Glass (pictured), or Bulleit Bourbon’s oblong tumblers. Most brown spirits go in one of the former glasses. White spirits often in the latter. No real reason for the separation, just habit really.

Of the two whisky glasses, I prefer the Riedel. The Glencairn is more popular in the industry and at events, but I find it concentrates the alcohol vapors too strongly, trapping them in the glass — and making it hard to smell anything but harsh alcohol when you take a sniff. The tulip mouth of the Riedel lets some of the alcohol escape, and while it also lets some of the nose of the actual spirit out, I find this is a small price to pay for the advantage of aerating the spirit, and ultimately it results in a clearer impression of what’s being tasted.

For wine, I try to use the traditionally appropriate glass (I have a wide selection of Riedel stemware from a variety of its product lines, quite a hodgepodge now), in as large a bowl as possible. For inexpensive wines (like boxed wines) I may use a standard, off-the-rack smaller wine glass or stemless wine glass for the sake of simplicity, but for more serious wines I try to go with the big stuff. Most of my glasses are from Riedel’s Vinum or Vitis series.

For beer, I use either a Spiegelau Beer Classics glass or the Samuel Adams Pint Glass, both of which I’ve reviewed.

It’s true that glassware does impact your experience, so it’s not foolish to be thoughtful about what you pour your $300 whiskey into. Hope that helps. Happy tasting, and remember: Glassware makes for a great Christmas gift — and you can carry it on an airplane, unlike a bottle of wine or whiskey.

If you’re a regular imbiber, it’s a good idea to test yourself once in awhile to make sure you’re OK to drive. 0.08 percent blood alcohol content (BAC) is the maximum legal level in most states, but knowing if you’re over that threshold can be difficult (particularly as you get closer and closer to it).

Portable blood alcohol testers can be helpful, but many require patience and luck to get them to work properly. Here’s a look at two very different models from AlcoHAWK, one of the leaders in personal breath analyzers.

AlcoHAWK Slim Ultra fits in a pocket and is about the size of a cell phone. The unit works well… when it works. Making that happen requires blowing into the unit for five seconds, turning it on, then waiting for it to count down from 100 to zero, a process that can take several minutes. Then, more often than not, the unit signals that it has an error. You have to repeat the entire process from scratch, then hope for the best. Sometimes you need one reboot, sometimes four. We never got it to work right on the first try, but when we did finally get it going, it offered results exactly in line with the more professional tester (accurate to three decimal places) that we had to compare with. B / $50 [BUY IT HERE] (pictured)

AlcoHAWK One Test is a single-use breath alcohol tester that has pretty limited value no matter what you’ve been up to that evening. It’s a slim tube the size of a cigarette that works only once. To use it, you puncture both ends, then blow into it like a straw. You then wait basically wait until the yellow crystals inside turn green. If the level of greenness crosses the line and red dot on the tube, you’re over 0.05% BAC — and presumably you shouldn’t drive. The accuracy is questionable, and I imagine if you are drunk enough to see a lot of green crystals in here, you know you shouldn’t be driving anywhere. But at least it’s portable. C / $20 for five [BUY IT HERE]

I’ll let the company explain: “The brewers worked with a team of world-renowned sensory experts to develop a glass that would enhance the tasting experience of Boston Lager, similar to the way different wine glasses are designed to enhance the flavor of wines.   The glass features the turbulator, which is a bead on the inside rim, this creates turbulence as you sip the beer, releasing the aroma.  It has a laser etched nucleation site at the bottom that creates bubbles to maintain flavor release. Bubbles come up from the bottom, similar to a champagne glass.”

I tried it out (with some Pliny the Elder) and agree that it really is a great glass. It has weight, unlike some delicate crystal glassware, which feels like it will break apart in your hand and which doesn’t keep your beer cold enough. The outward turned lip makes it easy to drink from. And — bonus — it fits easily in the dishwasher at the end of the night.

At $30 for four glasses (cheaper if you shop around), it’s also a great deal.

A / $30 for 4 / samueladams.com