IMPORTING THE SUPERIOR CULTURE:

The secrets of stout (Julie Johnson, 3/04/09, Indy Week)

The name of Guinness is nearly synonymous with stout. The Dublin giant, founded by Arthur Guinness in 1759, is the acknowledged source of the name "stout" for this style of beer. Once used as an adjective to describe his distinctive, robust version of porter beer—"stout porter"—"stout" gradually became a style name in its own right. [...]

Well-poured stout is handsome to look at: It's inky black with a creamy- to tan-colored head that clings to the sides of the glass. The dense foam blankets the beer, so there is very little aroma of hops.

The first sip is a sensation of cool velvet. The flavors are dry and roasted—a contrast to sweeter flavors in other styles of stout—with a bitter, black coffee-like edge, hints of dark chocolate and burnt breakfast toast. With its astringent finish, stout has been a natural partner to the briny flavors of seafood. A glass of cool stout and a platter of Galway Bay oysters is a flavor combination even better than the sum of its parts.

Modern Irish stouts owe their silky texture to the recent invention of a dispense system for the beer that combines both nitrogen and carbon dioxide, as opposed to the pure carbon dioxide found in other beers. To talk to Irish expatriates longing for a well-poured Guinness, you'd think the milkshake-like texture was as old as Arthur Guinness himself: In fact, the nitrogen-assisted system that creates the distinctive viscosity was pioneered by his own company in the 1960s.

The nitrogen produces tiny, tight bubbles that cascade, oddly, downward in your glass—a phenomenon that has kept physicists mesmerized with their fresh pints for decades. The head seems to recharge itself, so the beer remains creamy to the last.

The "nitrogen pour" was such a sensation that it soon became the established dispense system, first for all Irish stouts, and later for a variety of English ales, such as Boddington's. Purists disliked the way the nitrogen layer deadened the flavor of the beer, but drinkers loved it.

Not that last generation's Tancredos, Buchanans and Limbaughs were wrong to try and keep the bog-trotters out, but they sure brought a good beer with them....

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Posted by Orrin Judd at March 5, 2009 10:29 AM