Guinness Widget

Now for something totally different.

First a bit of historical context.  We ate at a great beer and pizza place in Kearney, Nebraska, last month, Old Chicago Pizza and Taproom.  (See the end of this post.)  In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I had a Guinness which was on tap.  I am not sure if I had ever had a Guinness.  If I had, it had been long long ago.  It was great in so many ways, including the very smooth, creamy foam on the top, which is unlike most other beers.

After returning home I ordered a Guinness while eating out at our local Red Robin.  I knew they would not have Guinness on tap, but they did list it on the menu so I ordered one to see how it would compare to my earlier experience.  It was in a can, but the foam was still that smooth tiny bubble foam like I had had in Kearney.  However, as I got to the end of the can I could hear something rattling around inside.  It was then that I vaguely remembered reading about some special device that Guinness adds to their beer to get the desired smooth foam similar to their beer on tap.

How do they do it?  Almost immediately after that, I stumbled across this explanation on Modernist Cuisine and how it all works.  The important issue is that the creamy foam comes from pressurized nitrogen rather than carbon dioxide as in most beers.  Nitrogen is much less soluble in water than carbon dioxide...more than 100x less soluble at cold beer temperature according to this site.  It hence makes much smaller bubbles. 

Bubbling nitrogen through the beer is relatively easy to achieve if on tap using a tank of nitrogen, but not so easy with a can or bottle.  To get the bubbling nitrogen, Guinness adds a small amount of liquid nitrogen just before sealing the can.  Also in the can is their patented "Widget", a hollow plastic sphere with a small hole.  The increased pressure inside the sealed can after the liquid nitrogen vaporizes forces nitrogen and beer into the center of the widget.  When the can is opened, the gaseous nitrogen comes out of the widget and bubbles up through the beer, forming the foam.

We discover a new (to us) beer store in Flower Mound. This would have been the end of the story, but we happened to see a feature article in the Dallas Morning News about a new (to us) filling station in Flower Mound which stocks over 800 different brands of beer.  I am sure we could have gotten Guinness at other places, but we decided to pick up a six-pack at this place so we could check it out.  It was interesting, with LOTS of different beers.  An additional discovery we made on this trip...Guinness comes in "four-packs" rather than "six-packs".

Taste-wise I am not sure it was quite up to what I had remembered from before, but it did indeed have the creamy foam on top.

Next up was the reason for getting our own cans, ripping one open to find the Widget. Sure enough, the plastic sphere was inside.

 

Opened can with widget

Close up of Widget--a little more than 1 inch in diameter

Pretty cool...especially given the thousands of gallons of liquid nitrogen I have gone through over the years.  And to think that all of these years I have been lecturing to my students repeatedly about not putting liquid nitrogen into a sealed container.  I was always concerned it would explode.  Now off to figure out what volume of liquid nitrogen will produce the amount of gas to fill the Widget but not explode the can. 

New Food for the Wrens

Update on the wren nest.  We don't have any updates on the wren nest outside our bathroom window.  After the frantic activity to build the nest, things suddenly went very quiet.  It is rare that we see the wrens going in and out of the house, but we do see them.  We also see them occasionally at the feeders in the backyard.  Since we still see them around, we feel confident they are still working on hatching a brood of new little wrens.  Apparently they have not yet hatched.

A new food--mealworms.  It had been suggested to us that since wrens are insect eaters we should consider offering them mealworms, at least while they are raising their young. 

Close up of mealworms from Wikipedia

Mealworms are not actually worms, but are larvae of the mealworm beetle. Although they seem kind of gross at first, they are at least dry, not slimy.

Mealworm beetle, Tenebrio molitor, by Didier Descouens (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Mealworms, although not a complete balanced diet, turn out to be an excellent source of protein.  They are supposedly also edible by humans, but I think I will pass.  

Off we went to Wild Birds Unlimited for mealworms and a feeder, something with steep slippery sides to keep them from crawling out.  The mealworms came in a small plastic container with holes in the top to let in air.  They are to be kept in the refrigerator to keep them from progressing through their larval stages into the pupa stage.  We only want "worms", not beetles.  We only hope our refrigerator is not TOO cold.

There were supposedly 500 mealworms in the container, along with some type of dry meal.  A half teaspoon or so of this mixture is to be spooned into the feeder.  If any mealworms are left in the feeder after 24 hours, we were told to add a few raisins or half a grape as a source of food and moisture for the "worms".

As with all new items offered to the birds, we did not know if or when they would find them.  There is a lot of information on the web about birds and mealworms.  We specifically had the wrens in mind, but other insect eating birds that use our feeders include chickadees and titmice.  Hopefully one or more of these birds would find the new feeder.  Other birds such as robins and mockingbirds love mealworms, but would not likely find them in our yard since we had never offered them anything they like (other than water in the water bowls on the patio) and are hence not around the feeders.

We set everything up and waited.   Shown below is the result.