Speeding up the chilling process

There are plenty of ways to chill beverages; unfortunately, most of them take time. Put a can of warm soda or a bottle of room-temperature Gatorade in the refrigerator, and you've got a long wait before it's palatable.

While putting it in the freezer helps, you're still looking at 30 minutes to an hour before it's really cold. Even ice cubes take a few minutes, and there are some beverages that you might not want to water down.

Fortunately, the Cooper Cooler provides a means to chill soda and beer cans, wine bottles and other beverage containers, and it can also be used to warm baby bottles.

The chilling process requires you to add ice and cold water to the cooler. When you turn it on, it spins your bottle while dousing it with a steady stream of ice water. To cool a can to 43 degrees takes approximately one minute. If you want it colder (we're talking brain freeze here), press the "Extra" button, and in about three minutes, your beverage is right around 34 degrees -- that's two degrees above freezing.

Actually, it can chill cans 40 times faster than a freezer and 90 times faster than a refrigerator. That's not bad if you're really hot and dying for a cold drink.

If you want to chill a can of beer or soda and are worried about it foaming over when you open it, you can hit the "No Spin" button, and your beverage is ready perfectly chilled in just two minutes.

The front of the cooler has a lift up flap that allows a bottle of wine to fit inside. The owner's manual has suggested times for various wines: Reds, Zinfandels and Burgundies will take a minute or two while sweet and sparking wines can take anywhere from six to 10 minutes. That's 10 times faster than a freezer and 20 times quicker than a refrigerator.

If you fill the cooler with hot water from the tap, you've turned it into a baby bottle warmer. The times range from one to 4 minutes depending upon the size of the bottle and whether or not you choose to spin it.

The Cooper Cooler is available in both white ($69.99) and chrome ($79.99). There's also a special Tailgater model in chrome for $89.99 that comes with a 12-volt adapter for your car.

The unit is six inches wide by nine inches high by 14 and a half inches long, so it doesn't require an abundance of storage space.

For more information, visit www.coopercooler.com.