The printing process has changed a lot over the past couple of decades. It’s not just ink or toner on paper anymore. We’re printing with stuff like plastic filament, chocolate, and cement in three dimensions these days.
It’s not just what we can print with that’s changed, either. It’s what we can print on. And beer foam has got to be one of the most unexpected materials we’ve seen so far.
That’s what Beer Ripples is designed to do. Pop a frothy glass or mug of beer onto the printer’s base, choose the text or image you want to appear in the head, and let it do its thing. Prints are rendered using a malt-based ink and take about 10 seconds to complete. The results are pretty slick, and undeniably fun:
The only limit (other than a monochrome color palette, naturally) is your imagination. Beer Ripples is Internet connected and app-enabled, so you can upload your own images and have them etched into freshly-poured beers.
Beer Ripples isn’t the kind of thing you’re likely to buy and use at home, unless maybe you’re also thinking of buying a Karlmann King. The street price for Beer Ripples is a cool $3,000. There’s also an annual $1500 subscription required, which provides enough malt-based ink to do around 6,000 prints.
That’s not a bad deal for Beer Ripple’s target customers: bars. It’s a very unique way to promote a business, and one that has the potential to generate a huge amount of buzz on social networks. People love posting food and drink pics, and you’ve got to think that people will be Instagramming and Tweeting the heck out of their custom-printed beers.
Beer Ripples can generate more than buzz, too. It’s got profit potential, too. Charging patrons to send custom messages in a beer would help a bar that’s interested in buying one of these machines recoup the purchase cost in a hurry.
You Can Now Print On Beer Foam [Geek]