Save The Growlers!

It happened again the other day. The hubby, excited about a new beer, brought home a growler full and immediately cracked it open to share with me. While it was a fantastic beer, I was perfectly happy with just a small glass that night. But the seal had been broken, and experience told us we needed to polish off the whole thing off because in a few short hours, the beer would start going flat.

That’s a shortfall of the traditional growler: Even with the most careful pour, enough oxygen gets into it that it can make the beer go flat fairly quickly—especially after the cap has been opened.

Wish we’d had the Growler Saver, a patent-pending cap that fits most traditional growlers and ensures a draft-like beer pour, even after breaking the original seal.

It works by using a small carbon dioxide cartridge like the ones used in soda siphons. After the device injects the full growler with CO2, users manually open the built-in relief valve (which also works as a safety valve to prevent over-pressurization) to purge all the oxygen out of the growler’s head space, so the growler can be topped off with more CO2. The process creates a pillow of CO2 that protects the beer from oxygen. Plus, the growler can be topped off with more CO2 each time it’s opened, assuring a brewery-fresh pour every time.

The concept, created by Steve Mosaic of Philadelphia, has been so popular, it recently exceeded its crowd-funding goal on Kickstarter. ■