Why do the pints taste so good here? It's not an accident it's excellence from 'Gas to Glass'.
Draught beer is like love. It takes perfect chemistry.
The three most important components to pouring the perfect draught pint are Temperature, Pressure and Gas Mix. If the beer is too warm it will expel CO2 and pints will overfoam. That’s why we keep the keg room between 36 and 38 degrees and our Glycol lines are kept between 29 and 32 degrees. (If you know what a Glycol line is drink now.) The beer comes out of the taps at right around 39 degrees- even the Guinness.
The PSI (Pounds of Pressure Per Square Inch) is very important to ensure that draught comes out of the tap smoothly. If the pint comes out too fast it will foam up and detract from the quality of the pint. Good flow allows for the pint to be poured with good head, which is very important to the longevity of your pint’s quality.
The wrong mix of carbon dioxide and nitrogen will kill a great beer. There's a pretty complex system of regulators to make sure the gas mix is just right each type of beer we serve - lagers, ales and of course Guinness. We even sometimes use a nitrogen generator- it actually generates the necessary nitrogen right out of the air and pumps it into the beer system- it's pretty cool.
Cleanliness is next to Guinnessness.
Clean Lines are very important to the quality of beer that you drink. Some pubs never clean their lines- if you have had a poor tasting pint (especially a Guinness) its most likely because the lines that carry the beer are dirty (deposits, sediments and other gunk created by beer).
Many places will clean their lines once a month. It's not uncommon for us to clean our lines every 2-3 weeks to make sure that the beer we pour for you is as clean as it can be and tastes fresh. During the cleaning process, we will regularly spill more pints than many places serve in a day just to make sure the lines are as clean as they can be.
We love beer. More importantly, we love fresh beer.
We go above and beyond the industry norms to ensure you get the freshest pint possible. Every keg that comes to the pub is checked in and the date is examined. If the 'best by' date is not right we send it back. Our standards for keg dates and fresh product exceed the standards set by our European brewers.
Once a new, fresh keg is delivered to our storeroom, each keg is rotated. This rotation ensures that no keg is sitting in the cold room for too long.
If the glass fits, drink from it.
Glassware and how it is cleaned and stored is very important to the overall quality of the pint. All beers react, pour and taste differently depending on the glass they are poured into. Each glass you see in the Pub is designed specifically to house its beer.
Lagers (like Stella Artois) are more delicate, so they often come in glasses with a tapered top to help hold the head better. Ale (like Smithwick's) glasses are often wider because they don't need help with head retention and they are able to better show off their color.
We make sure that Guinness is served in a Guinness glass, Harp is served in a Harp glass, Stella is served in a Stella chalice and so on. This means that you get a fresh pint, served as it was intended to be.
Maintaining glassware correctly is critical to the taste of your pint. Our pint glasses are not just
clean, they are what we call 'beer clean'. That means all of the invisible impurities that exist on a pint glass have been stripped during our cleaning process.
Pint glasses are never cleaned with anything that has dairy in it (like a coffee cup or Irish coffeeglass). Nor are they every cleaned in a machine that regularly cleans food or dairy items (like back in the kitchen).The reason for this attention to detail is dairy products will leave permanent impurities on a glass-it's almost impossible to get the glass 'beer clean' again.
As a result, we'll often just throw a glass away if it has come into contact with dairy products.
And, a cigarette? Forget about it- throw a butt in a pint glass and you can never get it properly clean again. The glass has to go.
As you drink your pint, you should notice a nice 'lacing' of foam around the glass. It's an easy way to confirm you are in fact 'beer clean'.
A proper head is key to a perfect pint.
Different brands have different pouring rituals. Much of the ritual is performed to make sure your pint has a proper collar of foam, or head. The head of pint is a protective crown that locks in the freshness and taste and helps concentrate the aromas from the pint.
Once air starts to get into your pint, it begins to lose its freshness and taste. The head protects your pint from the air destroying the taste.Some pints, like Guinness, add head naturally; we use special faucets on our taps that allow us to add head to pints that don't create it naturally.
We also use scrapers to get rid of excess bubbles that will break down the head. The scraper is left in water; this acts as a protective film, keeping the head consistent down to the last drop.
