A friend returned from Ireland and England raving about the thickness of the head on a pint of Guinness. Can this be accomplished by a homebrewer? What technique?
Sure it’s easy…just pour the beer with a of force and you get a big head. That’s the theory behind the nitro pour. You can push the beer with a lot of pressure without having the nitro overcarb the beer. Before Guinness went to nitro, it used to come packaged with a syringe (really!). You’d suck some beer up into the syringe, shoot it back into the glass and bingo…big head! To me, the downside is that it strips the carbonation out of the beer.
+1
That’s my take as well Denny. Big head is nice but takes away from the carbonation. I like a good balance between the two.
Do you really want to wait long enough for a giant head to settle a bit, before you take a drink?
I typically have a foam moustache.
I’ve waited long enough, while it was aging…
Now that it’s in the glass, I’m drinking!
It’s been a while since I’ve made a stout (almost a year and a half), but I remember the first time I brewed on it came from a kit with some maltodextrin. For those of us who don’t have nitro taps, or are too lazy for a syringe, I’d try some maltodextrin.