[rjharper]

Ok I have a hairbrained idea, and thought I'd run it past people who should know better!

It's my understanding that as a homebrewer it's difficult, if not impossible, to bottle a nitro beer and not have it seem flat when it's poured later. We need a widget. Commercial nitro beers, add a small amount of liq N2 right before bottling, which raises the pressure in the bottle and forces the beer into the widget, then when the bottle is opened, the beer escapes the widget, foaming and causing nucleation sites for the rest of the beer.

What if we reused bottles with widgets in them? I may not have ready access to liq N2 (actually at work I do, but it's a logistics thing), but we could add a pellet of dry ice, or maybe if the beer was over beer-gas-carbed to begin with, that would suffice.

Thoughts? Discuss...

[denny]

How about doing it the way Guinness did before the widget?  Guinness used to come with a syringe.  You'd suck up some beer and shoot it back into the glass.  It created the swirling foamy head and decarbonated the beer the same way nitro does to give it the creamy mouthfeel.

[tschmidlin]

I don't think you can re-sanitize the widget in the bottle.  It might be ok for a time or two though.

[beersk]

Left Hand brewing figured out how to bottle their nitro Milk Stout without using a widget...couldn't tell you how they did it though.

[Pi]

allot of bars use a nitro/CO2 mix. Can you force carb using this to get that creamy head (on draught)? Or do you force with CO2 and use the mix just for serving? I dont know anything about it!

[denny]

allot of bars use a nitro/CO2 mix. Can you force carb using this to get that creamy head (on draught)? Or do you force with CO2 and use the mix just for serving? I dont know anything about it!

Yes, you force carbonate with CO2 (hence the word "carbonate) and just use the beer gas for serving.

[rgnlkngtylrbmbstk]

If all you need is serving pressure, get a rubber stopper with two holes (I think #3 works for bottles) and put a blowtube in one hole, that reaches the bottom of the bottle. The second hole has a restrictor of some sort (e.g. modified bottle filler?) so that when you decap, insert tube and fix stopper, turn upside-down and blow, the beer is "shot" into the glass.
Genius.

Alternately, we could avoid the reverse reverse engineering and enjoy a low-carbonated ale as it is. Pour aggressively for more foam.