The plastic thing, or widget, is a nitrogen charge of some sort. Guinness is dispensed with nitrogen rather than carbon dioxide. This give it much smaller bubbles and produces the creamy head. Guinness should also not be served ICE cold, but at cellar temperature, More like 50 degrees. I hate it when a bar will serve Guinness in an ICED budwiser mug. Budwiser is only served iced to distiguish its taste from that of urine.Leebo8-9-8 said:They can it now with this little plastic thing in there that really makes it creamy! Something about it puts more air into the glass when it's poured or something....
Agree with everything except the bit about gravity. Classic Stouts are typically in the 1.038 - 1.048 range, which is not all that high. The Foreign Stout sub-style is somewhat higher at 1.052 - 1.072.wpeloqui said:The plastic thing, or widget, is a nitrogen charge of some sort. Guinness is dispensed with nitrogen rather than carbon dioxide. This give it much smaller bubbles and produces the creamy head. Guinness should also not be served ICE cold, but at cellar temperature, More like 50 degrees. I hate it when a bar will serve Guinness in an ICED budwiser mug. Budwiser is only served iced to distiguish its taste from that of urine.
Also Guinness in the can is still a Stout. A stout is a really just an very high specific gravity dark ale, it is really called a stout porter. A porter is a dark ale.
Beer is subdivided into two catagories based on the yeast used in production. Lagers are a top fermenting yeast and Ale is a bottom fermenting yeast. The lagers usually require cooler temperatures to produce optimum results during brewing.
I guess I ranted on enough about beer.
Willie
Not quite. Alcohol is less dense than water. What you're measuring with specific gravity is sugar. Sugar is what the yeast ferments into alcohol so you can think of SG as potential alcohol. However the yeast don't have perfect attenuation - 70-80 % is normal for beer yeast. A substantial portion of the sugars are complex sugars like malto-triose that the yeast may or may not (depending on strain) be able to ferment. So some of the sugar is left behind. The amount of alcohol is determined from the difference between original gravity (before fermentation) and the final gravity (after fermentation). I can't find the exact formula right now but if I do I'll post it for you. Typical original gravities range from 1.040 to 1.065 and final gravities are from 1.008 to 1.015. They can obviously go much higher than this in some styles of beer but those ranges are pretty common.LuckyDawg said:the specific gravity is based on the percentage
of alcohol, i.e, higher specific gravity means higher
alcohol content due to alcohol being more dense than
water.
BinDerSmokDat said:I saw "Guinness recipe" and thought it was going to be an ingredient in a food recipe.
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