Is Guinness Nitrosurge Just More Marketing Hoopla?

I don't get the idea of Guinness "tasting creamy". *Feeling* creamy, sure, but cream is famously sweet, containing lactose sugar. Beer foam concentrates hop oils, so tastes bitter. Because it's denser than foam on carbonated beer, nitrogenated stout foam is even bitterer. It's tangy, and tastes to me of zinc and crisp green vegetables. It doesn't taste remotely like cream. Neither does the body. I think the taste is being conflated with the look and feel of the head.

Thanks for coming to my Head Talk.

What's the difference?

I have. I don't detect any difference in the taste of Draught Guinness whether poured from a tap, a widget can or the Nitrosurge device. Hence when someone says they've done a blind test and there's a difference, I'm interested in what that perceived difference was. And then, depending on what it is, how that happened -- the base liquid is the same: how do the mechanics of dispense affect its sensory qualities? I'm a bit of a beer nerd that way.

How did the Guinness differ between the three formats?

That's true, but it's not the same as saying "anything goes, and every opinion is as valid as the next". There is such a thing as sensory analysis of beer. It's possible to learn how beer flavour works, what the flaws are, and what the standardised vocabulary to describe them is. There are organisations who offer qualifications in this. People who do this stuff, whether it's as part of quality assurance for a brewery, for homebrew competitions or for commercial competitions, can tell you when a beer is oxidised, under-attenuated, phenolic, light-struck etc etc: it's not just "these two are different, and this one is better".

So when someone expresses a strong opinion on the relative merits of different beers, or their dispense methods, I find myself trying to fit that into my own understanding of how beer is perceived. "There's a difference... try it yourself" is frustratingly vague, especially if it's off the back of a real live blind test -- blind tests are a brilliant way to learn about this stuff. Gimme the deets!

I don't know what you mean by "regular". Is it the carbonated form sold as "Guinness Original Extra Stout" and "Guinness XX"? This is the same fluid but the carbonation makes its sensory qualities different from the nitrogenated version. The extra carbonic acid means it's drier and sharper, but the propulsion effect you get from carbonation means the dark grain flavour and tangy lactic sourness are more pronounced.

The product sold as "Draught Guinness", whether from a widget can, a Nitrosurge can or on tap in a bar, any bar, does all taste the same to me. The heads might look different when first poured, but that's not a factor that interests me. It has the same slightly bitter toasty roast and sour tang as you get from the carbonated version, but less of it because nitrogen doesn't propel flavour compounds the way carbon dioxide does. The finish is also longer because those flavour compounds will hang around in the mouth longer, they don't get scrubbed off by the fizz.

By Irish stout standards, Guinness is a pretty bland one. It doesn't contain chocolate malt so there isn't the same balancing sweetness that you get from, say, Murphy's or O'Hara's (yes I've checked this blind). That's why I'm particularly interested when commenters say Guinness varies; there isn't much in it to vary, especially in the nitrogenated formats. Maybe they're only judging the appearance, though I've never seen someone claim that that's the only important factor when assessing a pint.

Another failed attempt by me at getting an informed opinion from a Guinness drinker 🙁 Maybe the next one will have some substance behind the assertions.

I can't square "you can always get a bad pint" and "it's all personal tastes". Both of those can't be true. Quality assurance is a real thing and there are objective standards. The lad in the Guinness van isn't going round checking that the pints are to his personal taste.

You don't think there can be a consensus on what constitutes a bad pint?

The opposite! Nobody who identifies "bad pints" provides any information on what was wrong with it. There is absolutely a consensus way of doing this — here's one set of agreed and standardised terms — but what you get instead is people saying it's insufficiently "creamy", it's "watery", it made them sick at one end or other of their digestive tract, none of which matches the list of things that actually go wrong with beers when they're bad.

And yes, the fact that it's not only a homogenised, pasteurised, thoroughly QA'd beer that gets singled out for being uniquely variable, but a dark one too, suggests that something might not be right. But I don't know. It needs somebody who knows how to do an objective sensory analysis of beer to apply it to a bad pint.

But nobody who can analyse beer objectively ever seems to get a bad pint of Guinness, and nobody who has experienced a bad pint of Guinness seems able to describe its flaws in objective sensory terms. There has to be a solution to this mystery! I genuinely don't know what it is, though.

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