Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget

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Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we're talking short stuff today.
We're talking widgets on short stuff, I should say. Widgets that were first introduced as a concept from a play.
Right, Chuck? Yeah. I mean, there was the word, first of all, we need to thank our old buddy Brian Didsbury.

Oh, right.

The boom operator on the Stuff You Should Know TV show.

So great.

Who comes to our live shows, still a friend.

He texts me all the time trying to get me to play Red Dead Redemption with him online.

He texts me Simpsons quotes.

Does he really?

Mm-hmm.

Oh, did he text you about this too?

No.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, he texted me a couple of days ago and he's like, hey, man, how about one on the Guinness widget?

I was like, done, buddy.

It's a good thing. Oh, did he text you about this too? No.
Oh, okay. Yeah, he texted me a couple of days ago and he's like, hey, man, how about one on the Guinness widget?

I was like, done, buddy.

It's a good idea for sure.

It is.

And thanks to Guinness.com, HowStuffWorks, Conversible Economist, Petroleum Service Company, where else?

YouTube?

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Okay.
Anyway, widgets. Everybody thinks it's basically a spinoff of the word gadget, which is probably true.
We don't know the true etymology, but I believe it was in a play in 1924 where they specifically in the play talked about like we're in the widget business. And that may be like the first time that anyone had ever used it like that.

But then Guinness came along and said, well, you know what?

Everyone talks about widgets.

It's just a thing you make, a nameless thing you make at any company.

We're going to make a real thing and we're really going to call it a widget and get it patented as such.

Yeah, and they did.

It's this thing that makes canned Guinness much more like Guinness from the tap, which is actually much more like Guinness from a cask because Guinness is its own kind of thing, as a matter of fact. And I say we dig into how Guinness is Guinness.
That's right. I think we should prep people that this simple, simple little short stuff was a cause of a lot of emails and consternation between us today, right? Is it simple? I think so.
All right. Well, I think you should take the lead then.
It's basically a ping pong ball. Oh, yes.
The widget is simple, right? So let's talk about what we're talking about. If you open a can of Guinness, and just the can, it's not in the bottle, there's a little plastic sphere with a hole in the bottom that you will hear rattling around the can.

If you cut the can open, very gently set one aside and then be very careful holding the

other one up because it's a sliced can.

They're very dangerous.

And look inside, you'll see this little plastic sphere. That is the Guinness widget.
And there's no one with it. It's not that big, is it? No, it looks a little smaller.
But could you, though, does it have bounce to it? I doubt it because it's not it's not full of air. OK, and it's heavier.
I was just making a joke. OK, I didn't know I could see that that being like a thing that the internet figured out.
I bet they've done that in Ireland. And by the way, Guinness calls these officially within the Guinness company.
They call it a smoothifier. Okay, so everybody else calls it a widget then.
Yeah. Okay, so they put this in there and only God themselves knows how they work.
Well, let's talk a little bit about a guy named Michael Ash. In 1951, Michael Ash joined the Guinness Company.
He was a mathematician. He was a master brewer.
He was a big believer in science. And he was like, hey, there's all these beers that are made with carbon dioxide.
And it's that CO2 that dissolves in the beer that makes it fizzy when you open it up. When the can is closed, the pressure inside is much higher than the pressure outside.
So when you open that thing up, there's a pressure drop. And the agitation of pouring it makes that CO2 come bubbling out.
And that's where you get your foamy head on a beer. Right.
He was like, this cask Guinness is smooth and creamy, and CO2 just doesn't do it if we're going to try and put this stuff in pubs and eventually in cans. No, no.
So if you have a cask, the beer that's put into the cask, it ages in the cask. Like when you deliver it to a pub, it's still doing its thing aging.
And once you tap the cask, you have three days to drink it. That's how like unpasteurized and new it is.
But the thing is, is when you get the beer out of the cask, you have to actually pump it out. And that creates like a totally different pour and finish than if you're pouring it out of a keg.
So because the world kind of transitioned from casks to kegs around the middle of the 20th century, Michael Asher was like, well, then what can we do to make Guinness more cask-like or keep its cask-like profile and look and taste and everything? And he figured out that adding nitrogen is what would do that.

That's right.

And you know what?

I think that's a good little cliffhanger.

Okay.

So let's take a break and we'll talk about the magic inside the Guinness can and glass

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So where we left off, Michael Ash had discovered that nitrogen, along with it, it doesn't replace the CO2. It's a mixture of the carbon dioxide and nitrogen.
Right. But nitrogen isn't absorbed into the beer like carbon dioxide is.
So it has the same pressure of just a regular beer, but it has a lot less CO2. and so it's not as fizzy, which is not what you want out of a Guinness anyway, because that nitrogen is making up a great deal of that pressure inside the can.
Yes. And even though it's harder for nitrogen to dissolve inside beer, CO2, it's very easy.
Nitrogen will, some will dissolve and it forms smaller bubbles and more stable bubbles. So when you pour this nitrogen infused Guinness beer, the head will be foamier, much creamier than say like a CO2 lager head that eventually kind of settles down and looks like urine in a glass after a while, especially if you're

talking about Coors Banquet Beer.

This is like a foamy head that, because the nitrogen bubbles are more stable, stays around

way longer, too.

So we figured out by adding nitrogen, you can basically replicate the look and the feel

and the taste of cask-poured Guinness like it used to be.

That's right.

So the next step was like, how do I make this happen in a can?

It seemed like an impossibility until a guy named John Lunn, L-U-N-N, a master distiller,

created the widget.

The patent, I believe Guinness eventually filed for the patent in 69 for an improved

method of and means of dispensing carbonated liquids from containers.

It became... filed for the patent in 69 for an improved method of and means of dispensing carbonated liquids from containers.
It began as Project Dynamite, but apparently there was a lot of that was problematic for customs because it said Project Dynamite on all the paperwork and stuff. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah.
So they changed it to Project Oak Tree. They changed it to Project Dino My.

Right. They changed it to Project Nuclear Waste.

No, Project Oak Tree, I think, was a reference to the original Project Acorn from Guinness. So they wanted to get these cans right.

You can get Guinness in a bottle, but it's not the same beer at all.

It's a completely different beer.

So you like the canned version better huh oh yeah okay the pub version i might not be doing it right then because i'm like what is this crap like this is i would rather just drink the guinness out of a bottle any day of the week oh i mean do you like guinness in a pub i don't know that i've ever actually had real Guinness in a pub. Oh, Josh.
Because it's supposed to be. I'm taking you to England next week.
Okay. That'd be awesome.
You're like, really? Yeah. That just surprises me.
I must not import it correctly because it doesn't make any sense that they would even go to this trouble of putting a widget in it to make worse Guinness than it is in the bottle. So I just didn't do it right.
That's my guess. Well, maybe you just don't understand the concept of Guinness.
I mean, Guinness is supposed to go down like a milk and not a fizzy carbonated beverage. It's got – they call it the surge and settle.
It pours in and you just see it gently falling to the bottom and you get this milky foam at the top. The cascade.
Yeah. And like, that's why I could always drink a lot of Guinness because it didn't, it didn't fill you up and make you super gassy and burpy.
Wow. So I've been doing the opposite because drinking a single bottle of Guinness is like eating a whole loaf of bread to me.
Yeah, that's the bottle is completely different. Wow.
Okay. So I got to try this other version because what you're talking about is basically the opposite of the Guinness I'm familiar with.
Oh, wow. That is, that's funny.
Like, I really want to try it. Like, you've just blown my mind.
Yeah. Oh, man, go out and get a four-pack and crack the can open and then just dump it in the glass as hard as you can.
Just turn it upside down. Okay.
And it won't overflow or anything. It'll get to the top and just stop and then start settling.
Well, there's this other thing they have now, too, that I guess kind of takes the whole thing into a new level. It's called nitro surge.
Yeah, I saw that. You put it on top of a can and it does the pouring like it would from a cask, as far as I understand, right there at home or, you know, in the parking lot of a convenience store.
Yeah, I saw the Nitro Surge. I don't think they sell them here yet, but it's like a, I think it's like a mechanical device.
Like, does it have a battery in it even? I'm not fully sure. I stopped looking into it when I realized how much further it was taking me away from the widget.
You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. I forgot we were talking about the widget.
All right. Let's get back to the widget.
Okay. So the widget is a little plastic ball.
And I think this is where we got hung up earlier. I don't know if you saw my most recent email.
I think it's a matter of semantics because I kept saying that the, and Guinness on their website says it's a nitrogen filled sphere. And you're like, it's not filled with nitrogen.
I think it's just semantics because they don't literally fill this ball with nitrogen and then drop it in. Okay.
Some people say they do. It is because it has a hole in it.
It's, uh, you drop it in there and then fill the can with nitrogen. And then that ball fills up with nitrogen and beer.
Gotcha. I got it.
And it stays in this tiny, it's basically a little mini turbojet. So when you crack that beer, it's a little mini ball with higher pressure than the rest within even what's inside the rest of the can.
Right. And so when you crack that beer and all that pressure changes, just like a regular beer, it comes shooting out of that little tiny hole in the plastic ball and provides this little extra boost of nitrogen, like a little beer jet agitating everything to create even more bubbles.
Right. But the specific kind of nitrogen bottles that make Guinness, Guinness which are smaller and more stable.
So you get that foamy, creamy head and the cascade and all that. I get it.
I get it. Yeah.
All right. He did a great job.
I think it was the semantical thing when people say it's filled with nitrogen. It is.
But as a virtue of the canning process. Right.
They don't like fill it up and go like, quick, throw it in there. Right.
You have to hold it just right, put your thumb over the hole and then just throw it in and

put the top of the can on really quick.

Yeah, it's really ingenious though.

I mean, it's got this just tiny little hole and imagine a little ball filled with like

nitrogen infused beer being jetted out of this tiny little hole as you're pouring, as

you've opened and pouring this beer.

It's so simple.

It's ingenious and so ingenious that in 2004, they did a survey of almost 9,000 people. And they voted that the Guinness widget was a greater invention than the Internet.
Right. And they're wrong, but I get the point for sure.
I mean, it's something to put on your website. I guess it depends which version of the internet you're talking about, you know? Let me ask you this.
Have you ever had any, like, cream stouts? Yeah. Like Boddington's or Murphy's or any of those? Yes.
Okay. Yeah.
But just not the Guinness. Like, I just associate a stout with, like, I just had dinner three hours ago.
I can't drink a stout because I'll throw up. I'll be too full.
I think that's, to my mind, it's a misnomer because stout sounds heavy because it's a big dark beer. But it's because it's not heavily carbonated like a lager.
Like it doesn't fill you up like that. It doesn't make you gassy and burpy.
It's like drinking a big thick milk, which may make you feel full, but it's not from like gassy. OK, we're getting tripped up by semantics again.
It to me. Yeah, the big milky.
If I drank a big glass of milk after I ate, I would probably throw up. So it's the same thing in that sense.
But no, it's not making me like, you know, like Coors Banquipi or Wood or burpee or whatever. It doesn't fill you up in that sense.
It like literally fills you up. I got you.
Yes. So yeah, I think we're talking about the same thing.
Well, now I'm worried that I have experienced Guinness like you're supposed to, and there's not like a whole world out there for me to try. Well, you may not like it.
I'll try it for sure. I haven't, I mean, I don't drink a lot of beer anymore, period.
And I went through a big Guinness phase in the nineties, uh, starting in college and through New Jersey. And in fact, that brings me to another little factoid here.
Uh, the Guinness uses a floating widget, uh, since 1997. And I was like, Oh, that explains it.
Cause in the nineties we cut open the can because we were like, what is that in there? And it was fixed to the bottom of the can. So it was pre-97.
And during COVID with supply issues, they fixed it to the bottom of the can then as well. But otherwise, it's been a floating widget.
Wouldn't you have been freaked out when you cut the can open and you found the thing just fixed to the bottom of the can looking back up at you and blink yeah like a little irish eyeball right uh one other thing though there's a i noticed on this list old speckled hen uh uses widgets too which i didn't know that used to be one of my fave beers for a while yeah and the boddington's murphy's beamish tetley's uh Wexford, Belhaven, and I'm sure we've missed some, but they all use the widget technology to deliver that pub-drawn flavor to your lips right there at home. Yep.
This episode of Short Stuff brought to you by Coors Banquet Beer. Yeah, I doubt that.
You got anything else?

I got nothing else. I'm sure we got some stuff wrong.

There's some beer aficionados that are like, not quite right,

guys. Whatever.
I think you

should say the thing. Okay.

Short Stuff is out.

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