For Greg Schirf, founder of Wasatch Brewery and a connoisseur of dark, malty beers, the dream of discovering how to nitrogenate a bottled porter had always been lurking in the back of his mind.
Nitrogenating a draft beer — the process of carbonating it with nitrogen instead of carbon dioxide, giving it a smooth taste and an ultra-foamy head — was easy. Wasatch Brewery had been offering a nitrogenated version of its popular Polygamy Porter on draft for four or five years. But figuring out how to bottle a nitrogenated beer so customers could buy it at the store was something only a handful of brewers in the world had mastered.
Now, Wasatch Brewery can be added to the list. After months of perfecting the beer, the brewery recently released the bottled Polygamy Nitro Porter. A launch party for the beer was held Wednesday evening in Salt Lake City.
For Schirf, the release is the culmination of years of hoping and months of hard work.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so I’ve had some successes and some not-so-great outcomes,” Schirf said. “But this is a beer that has always been close to my heart because I like the style of beer. I always wanted to be able to get this done. We’d looked at it and talked about it. So finally to get this from A to B is really one of my highlights. It’s one of my prouder moments.”
The brewery delved into discovering the secrets behind bottling the nitrogenated porter more than a year ago. After several months of research and development, Schirf knew late last year that he and his staff were getting close. Finally, all the hard work — and the disappointment of many failed attempts — paid off.
“Early on, we’d try it and think we had it dialed in, then we’d go back two weeks later and the nitrogen had dissipated. So we’d go back to the drawing board, and eventually we narrowed in on it.”
The beer, which has an alcohol content of 6 percent by volume — and will thus be available only in state liquor stores — features a creamy, malty taste that Schirf compared to a milkshake. Additionally, the nitrogen carbonation gives it a foamy head that not only is tasty but gives it an appetizing appearance. For that reason, Schirf encourages people to pour it hard, straight into their glasses to maximize the bubbles.
“It pours just like a Guinness, with a great frothy head,” Schirf said. “And nitrogen bubbles are cool because they’re more like champagne bubbles. But you have to pour it hard. You don’t want to baby the pour like you would a Budweiser or tilt the glass. In this case, we’ve encouraged people to full-on dump it in your glass so you get the full cascading effect.”
An added bonus of the nitrogenation process is the beer is much less filling. Nitrogenated beer bubbles are smaller than that of carbon dioxide-carbonated beer and take up less space in the stomach.
“It certainly is easier to drink because it’s not as big of gas molecules going in your stomach,” Schirf said. “And it really smooths out the beer in some fashion. I can’t give you a biochemical definition as to why it does that, but a nitrogenated beer just seems more mellow, more chilled in a way.”
Now that the brewery has the experience and know-how to nitrogenate bottled beers, it may use the process to release other styles of nitro beer in the future. Typically, Schirf said, darker beers lend themselves more to nitrogenation than lighter beers, but the brewery may experiment with different styles. But first, it is waiting to see if the Polygamy Nitro Porter is a hit with customers.
“It seems silly, now that we’ve got the technology and the know-how, not to do it, but we’re going to let the market respond to this,” Schirf said. “If it’s a big success, then we’ll consider picking out another beer.”