Expert: Ed Westemeier - 8/26/2006

Question
Hi. I was wondering if you could help me.
I dont know if your familiar with boddingtons pub ale but it comes in a can with a nitrogen widget like guiness.I have been brewing a kit from austin homebrew that is a boddingtons clone kit. I have been kegging my kits and force carbonated my first kit with co2 but it didnt taste right.Do you know if it is possible to force carbonate my keg with beer gas {g-mix}instead of co2 to get closer to the real boddingtons. I also read that you can use a diffusion stone on my g-mix without carbonating at all.Also, does  beer need to be carbonated right away or can it be refrigerated in the keg for some time and then be carbonated? And last, what kind of gas should I use to serve a belgian ale {ST. Sebastians golden ale kit}?

Answer
All good questions! I'll try to give you the short answers.

You can use a beer gas mix (it's 75% nitrogen, 25% CO2) to carbonate your beer, and use exactly the same procedure you would normally use. A carbonation stone does it faster, but isn't really necessary. You should always carbonate it when it's as cold as possible.

You can skip the beer gas mix and simply use carbon dioxide as you normally would. The trick to getting a similar taste to Boddington's is simply using less carbonation. Where you might use something like 2.5 volumes of CO2 for a "normal" beer, you can use about 1.8 volumes for this, and you'll probably find it's much more "English" in character.

As for the Belgian ale, use straight CO2. Most Belgian ales are bottle conditioned, but the draft versions all use only CO2 (at least every Belgian brewery I've been to).