This Brotrepreneur Wants to Make Beer Pong Less Disgusting

There are few things on this bright, blue marble that incite irony of Odyssean proportions more than surviving your frat's anus-smothered hazing, only to be done in by a party cup littered with your roommate Dirk's fecal particulate during some celebratory beer pong. And while we arguably can't Manchurian Candidate you into forgetting about the time Dirk momma-birded a dead lizard into your hapless mouth, we can solve a food safety issue that 100-percent of its victims absolutely couldn't give a shit about.

I'm talking about dirty beer pong balls.

After all, even a film school graduate like myself—whose idea of a Friday night is a thimble of grappa and an existential crisis—doesn't need Tom Green to teach me that frat and college life is wholly about doing just enough stupid, life-threatening acts to look mildly cool, while half-heartedly telling your RA that you've learned your lesson. So creating a business that makes beer pong partying more sanitary is not exactly my go-to for an entrepreneurial venture.

But I would be wrong. Dead wrong. Chase Treibt and his four brothers—and we're talking real brothers, not frat brothers—have raised almost 100,000 actual US dollars with this business idea: the Slip Cup.

Slip Cup, according to their Kickstarter video, "takes the mess out of beer pong while putting the fun back into it."

This money-raking business idea works as follows. A custom-made mini-cup sits atop your usual red cup. Its purpose is to "prevent the dirty ball from landing in your beverage."

Incidentally, if anyone happens to know Mark Cuban, you should totally tell him about my product idea for fashion-forward pirates, Yarrgyle (patent pending).

Anyway, these Slip Cup people have a point. The ball in beer pong does get disgusting—it rolls on the floor, plops in backwash, and is handled by dozens of people. But does anyone really care? Perhaps these industrious beertrapreneurs know about the recent study that showed that playing beer pong can subject you to E. coli, staph, and salmonella poisoning.

I guess they must know because—have I mentioned this already?—these people have raised almost 100,000 dollars! This shit is pretty much just a female condom for your party cup, but there must be way more pledges with mysophobia than I thought.

Another mistaken apprehension of mine: Chase and bros have obviously spent more time than I had previously thought anyone should spend thinking about beer pong.

Here are some of their innovations. First, the Slip Cup is engineered to be highly efficient. Chase says their "market research shows that players want thin rims," so they have created the mini-cup to be user-friendly. I could totally make a snarky comment here about countless hours spent poring over statistics, but I'd rather imagine some Epic Meal Time-style bros in pristine lab coats, debating the dermatological merits of Mountain Dew baths.

A second appealing feature of the Slip Cup is its "catch element," which prevents the ball from bouncing out of the cup. Genius!

Third: the cups are center-weighted and have stacking ability.

I'm thinking that Chase is that guy in college who never went to class and showed no appreciable skills other than partying—the one for whom everyone wondered, "What will he become?" But I'm evidently wrong. Because Chase is on his way to Kickstarter success and, did I mention, is about to have 100,000 dollars.

Chase has also come up with 15 new beer pong games and claims to have a patent pending.

Here's a person who has truly conquered the titan of first-world problems, earning money from what he learned in college. I can only hope more intrepid trailblazers like the guys behind Slip Cup resolve the rest of the world's ills. Next: A sentient straw that can get the extra milk out of my macchiato.