Hi all,
Got a new toy for my bar I thought I might show you guys. It's one of those ultrasonic guinness surgers that you might see at a pub. Anyways, it turns out that apparently guinness are no longer selling the fairly flat surger cans in Oz, which inspired some poor publican to hock his on ebay. I stumbled across it and found myself to be the only one to bid on it. $0.99 fairly well spent I'd say.
About the device it self. Firstly, being the propper pub one it looks pretty cool. Comes with quite a large pseudo font thing that sits in front of the vibrating plate itself and has connections for the whole thing to light up.
Directions state to pour a wee bit of water on the vibrating plate then to gently pour your surger guinness into a glass, sit it atop and hit go. As stated earlier, apparently surger guinness is no longer readily available, so for my purposes I found that best results were achieved by beers that were lightly carbonated to start with (accidently or otherwise). The official info on the surger unit claims that it activates pre-dissolved nitrogen from the specially canned guinness. From a home brew perspective I have been getting great results using any brew poured through standard taps at standard pressures using plain CO2, but allowing the brew to sit in the glass for a couple of minutes first. I figure this allows the brew to become slightly less saturated with CO2, but may actually allow a bit of atmospheric nitrogen to disolve in also. I'm no gas physicist, and I agree that it sounds far fetched, but its just a theory based on my observations. It seems the longer you leave it stand in room air the more vibrant the result, despite the beer becoming progressively flatter in terms of CO2. There is of course a time limit, when after 5 minutes in Brisbane heat a pot is actually warmer and flatter of all dissolved gasses than is desirable, and no amount of surger-ing can do anything about it. But, when done correctly the result is quite amazing. The beer really does seem to have that glorious, creamy guinness head that seems to be the result of a nitrogen rather than CO2 bubble. The clincher for me is that the bubbles against the sides of the glass go down before they come up, which I personally take as a clear indication that its not just shaking up normal CO2.
Anyways, I made a very badly shot video of the surger doing its thing on my bock. Check it out if you care at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ozziehustler#p/a/u/0/YGmEn4vCAZk
Tom
Got a new toy for my bar I thought I might show you guys. It's one of those ultrasonic guinness surgers that you might see at a pub. Anyways, it turns out that apparently guinness are no longer selling the fairly flat surger cans in Oz, which inspired some poor publican to hock his on ebay. I stumbled across it and found myself to be the only one to bid on it. $0.99 fairly well spent I'd say.
About the device it self. Firstly, being the propper pub one it looks pretty cool. Comes with quite a large pseudo font thing that sits in front of the vibrating plate itself and has connections for the whole thing to light up.
Directions state to pour a wee bit of water on the vibrating plate then to gently pour your surger guinness into a glass, sit it atop and hit go. As stated earlier, apparently surger guinness is no longer readily available, so for my purposes I found that best results were achieved by beers that were lightly carbonated to start with (accidently or otherwise). The official info on the surger unit claims that it activates pre-dissolved nitrogen from the specially canned guinness. From a home brew perspective I have been getting great results using any brew poured through standard taps at standard pressures using plain CO2, but allowing the brew to sit in the glass for a couple of minutes first. I figure this allows the brew to become slightly less saturated with CO2, but may actually allow a bit of atmospheric nitrogen to disolve in also. I'm no gas physicist, and I agree that it sounds far fetched, but its just a theory based on my observations. It seems the longer you leave it stand in room air the more vibrant the result, despite the beer becoming progressively flatter in terms of CO2. There is of course a time limit, when after 5 minutes in Brisbane heat a pot is actually warmer and flatter of all dissolved gasses than is desirable, and no amount of surger-ing can do anything about it. But, when done correctly the result is quite amazing. The beer really does seem to have that glorious, creamy guinness head that seems to be the result of a nitrogen rather than CO2 bubble. The clincher for me is that the bubbles against the sides of the glass go down before they come up, which I personally take as a clear indication that its not just shaking up normal CO2.
Anyways, I made a very badly shot video of the surger doing its thing on my bock. Check it out if you care at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ozziehustler#p/a/u/0/YGmEn4vCAZk
Tom
