Welsh entrepreneur James Vyse had offers from the world’s biggest markets to launch his self-cooling beer can first. He turned them down in favour of home.

deltaH Innovation, the company Vyse founded and leads as CEO, has partnered with Cardiff-based Brains Brewery to bring Cool>Can to market, with Brains’ Bayside Welsh Lager set to become the first beer commercialised using the technology. The announcement caps more than two years of development and positions South Wales, rather than the US or Japan — both markets that had expressed interest — as the launchpad for the innovation.

A global product with a local address

James Vyse, founder and CEO of deltaH Innovation.

Cool>Can uses a patented chemical cooling system built into a can-within-a-can format, cooling a beverage by approximately 10–15°C when the consumer activates the mechanism. The design has been built to slot into the existing beverage supply chain, letting brands keep their preferred filling partners while deltaH integrates the cooling technology during the finishing process.

A pilot production line is already running in Wales, laying the groundwork for the company’s plans to scale manufacturing in the region. The Welsh Government has backed that ambition with a £500,000 grant to support deltaH’s technology and manufacturing development.

For Vyse, the choice of geography was never in question. “I’m incredibly proud to be Welsh, and I want to build something here that can have a global impact,” he said. “We’ve had interest from around the world and there were certainly people who wanted to be first, but for me there was always a real desire to build this in Wales.”

The Brains partnership, he said, was central to that. “It’s a Welsh company, it has an incredible heritage, and together we can take something that has been developed here and put Wales at the heart of a global technology story.”

Echoes of Felinfoel

Vyse frames the launch against a specific piece of Welsh industrial history: in 1935, Felinfoel Brewery in Llanelli became the first brewery outside the United States to produce canned beer. Nearly a century on, he sees Cool>Can as a chance to repeat that first.

“Wales has a history of doing things first,” he said. “Felinfoel produced the first canned beer outside the US, and now we have the opportunity to create the first self-cooling beer can. I think there is something really special about that. I’m a proud Welshman, and to be able to do this with another Welsh company like Brains makes it even more special.”

His ambitions run past the Brains launch. “My ambition is to build a Welsh unicorn,” Vyse said. “I want to prove that you can build a global technology company from South Wales. We don’t need to go somewhere else to make this happen. We can build it here, manufacture it here, create the jobs here and then take it to the world.”

The first commercialised Cool>Can, featuring Brains’ Bayside Welsh Lager, will be unveiled at London Packaging Week 2026 — the technology’s first step onto the international commercial stage.

Commercial debut

The Brains deal gives Cool>Can a real-world commercial debut and a manufacturing base, but the bigger test comes after London Packaging Week. Vyse has described interest from the US and Japan as genuine, which means deltaH’s next move — whether it licenses the technology internationally, exports finished product, or scales South Wales manufacturing to meet outside demand — will determine whether this stays a regional success story or becomes the global one Vyse is chasing.