Smooth and creamy: the story of nitrokeg beer in the UK

In the 1990s a new type of beer arrived on the UK scene and caused serious disruption to the market. It came to be known as nitrokeg.

We haven’t written anything substantial about nitrokeg before because, frankly, it struck us as boring. Both the beer itself and the narrative around it.

Our interest in beer began in the noughties just as nitrokeg was falling out of fashion. It was something CAMRA diehards grumbled about but felt irrelevant. And beer geeks simply weren’t interested.

Why even think about John Smith’s Smoothflow when you could be drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or Meantime IPA?

Now, 30 years on from its appearance on the market, it’s easier to appreciate the significance of nitrokeg, and to understand its legacy.

The arrival of nitrogen in beer

There’s little doubt that credit for introducing nitrogen conditioning to beer goes to Guinness and to one Guinness employee in particular: Michael Ash.

The story is well told by Jeff Alworth in an article for All About Beer from 2016. He explains that Ash, a Cambridge educated mathematician, was brought into Guinness as part of a graduate trainee scheme. He became obsessed with how to replicate the complex multi-cask pouring method used in Irish pubs:

Very early on, he saw nitrogen as the solution. It was “such an obvious gas,” he said. “It’s completely inert and it’s three-quarters of what we breathe. It was perfect for this purpose.” The trick wasn’t selecting the right gas, though; it was designing a keg that would work with it… Eventually, working with a keg designer, he did figure it out… The keg went through two designs before Guinness started sending it out to pubs, rushing at the end to get the project launched by 1959 – the brewery’s 200th anniversary.

For decades afterwards nitrogen was primarily used in stouts. Murphy’s launched a nitrogen version of its draught stout in 1968.

Further improvements were made to Guinness’s nitrogen kegs in 1988 so that they used a single chamber with a mixture of gases: 30% carbon dioxide and 70% nitrogen. This produced a tighter, creamier head and, crucially, allowed pints to be poured more quickly.

But it did require the beer to be served colder and the temperature of Guinness dropped from 12 degrees celsius to around 7 degrees.

This was the basis of the wider range of nitrokeg beers to come.

Then, in 1989, Guinness launched a canned version of its draught stout with a ‘widget’ – a device that released nitrogen into the beer when it was opened and poured.

The success of this novelty prompted Whitbread to launch a widget-can version of Boddington’s in 1991. This was a success and boosted Whitbread’s profits by £23 million that year. (Newcastle Journal, 19 November 1992.)

Guinness then launched its own canned widget bitter, Guinness Draught Bitter, in 1992, and over the next few years, most major UK breweries would launch widget-can versions of their own bitters.

The earliest example of a draught beer other than stout to be conditioned using nitrogen seems to be Belhaven Best, launched in 1991. As Martyn Cornell wrote in his book Beer: the story of the pint:

Scottish brewer Belhaven found itself struggling to sell cask ales in a local beer market where lager ruled, and most of that came from two giants, Tennent’s and Scottish & Newcastle… In 1991 Belhaven decided to try serving draught bitter under mixed nitrogen/carbon dioxide pressure, reasoning that a beer served this way would have less ‘bite’ than normal keg beers.

Tempting as it might be to assume that Belhaven kicked off the 1990s nitrokeg craze, however, this specific beer was not the one that really got people excited.

Caffrey’s crashes onto the scene

On St Patrick’s Day 1994, Bass officially launched a new beer called Caffrey’s Irish Ale, having soft launched it across the UK earlier in the year.

It was brewed at first at the Glen Road brewery in Belfast and designed from the ground up to appeal to drinkers of both Guinness and lager. The idea was that it would combine the creaminess of the former (thanks to nitrogen) with the cool lightness of the latter.

This goal seems to have been achieved. An puff piece in Sunday Life, a weekend spin off The Belfast Telegraph, from 20 March 1994, included quotes from drinkers at Bittles Bar in the city:

“It’s brilliant,” enthused local artist Joe O’Kane… “I’m usually a Bass or a Guinness drinker but I think I’ll stick with this,” he said… “Paul McLaughlin, another stout drinker, was another Bittles regular who gave an unqualified thumbs up to Caffrey’s… Regular lager drinker John Lynn was in agreement: “I think it’s a lovely ale. It’s got more flavour than Bass or Smithwicks.” And Dennis Carson, usually a Guinness drinker, agreed: “I would drink ales when I’m in England, Scotland or the continent… This one’s got a unique flavour. I think it will go down well with the Scots and English.”

Mr Carson’s analysis would prove to be very much correct and Caffrey’s became a huge success almost at once.

The Caffrey’s production line at the Glen Road brewery was at capacity even before the official launch, according to an article in the Ulster News Letter on 1 March 1994. Pubs were restricted to one keg a week and the brewery had to expand.

And, eventually, Bass began producing Caffrey’s in Burton upon Trent, too. (The Scotsman, 8 June 1996.)

Within a year and half of its launch, from a cold start, with no advertising for the first year, it was selling 2 million pints every week. (Daily Mirror, 29 August 1995.)

Numbers and dates are great, of course, but in a comment on Patreon John ‘The Beer Nut’ Duffy recalls what it felt like to encounter Caffrey’s at the time:

The arrival of nitrokeg ale coincides roughly with when I started drinking. In 1994 Northern Ireland, the Caffrey’s tap was new and exotic, and I’m sure teenage me went through a phase of drinking nothing else.

CAMRA reacts to the rise of nitrokeg

Having spent most of 1994 ignoring Caffrey’s, focusing instead on the supposed surging popularity of German-style wheat beer, CAMRA eventually identified Caffrey’s as a threat in October that year.

A front-page story in What’s Brewing was headlined “Danger signals in cask revival” and cited the second Carslberg-Tetley Cask Ale Report:

Big brewers, still wedded to volumes rather than quality, are attempting to staunch the loss of keg beer sales with new brands… served by mixed gas systems to make them less fizzy.

And the following month’s issue had a story with the headline “CAMRA goes to war on new keg beers”:

CAMRA’S National Executive has gone on the attack over the new generation of nitrogenated keg beers masquerading as cask… At a meeting in Burton-on-Trent the executive decided to write to all branches and Brewery Liaison Officers asking for information about misleading dispense and advertising for keg beers served by mixed dispense using CO2 and nitrogen… And Great British Beer Festival organiser Christine Cryne declared any brewers attempting to pass off keg beers as cask ales would be banned from the festival…

One of the most vocal critics of nitrokeg beer was beer writer Roger Protz who can always be relied upon for fiery words. In a column for trade paper The Morning Advertiser on 6 October 1994 he wrote:

This is new-tech beer. It is dead all right, chilled, filtered and generally eviscerated in the brewery. But now all the wonders of science come to its rescue… Dracula can rise from the grave with the aid of mixed gas dispense and all the other flim-flam invented by mad professors handcuffed to the head accountant’s cash till…

What had CAMRA and cask beer aficionados rattled was not Caffrey’s alone – it was the fact that other UK breweries were beginning to create draught versions of their widget-can nitro beers. Protz went on:

They’re all at it. It is unfair to single out Tetley. There are cask and keg lookalikes of many leading brands and the regionals are being pulled along in the wake… In my area I now have the choice of Charles Wells’ Bombardier on handpump or a keg version full of the maidenly nitrogen flushes.

Nitrokeg spreads

1994 gave us Caffrey’s and a nitrokeg version of Tetley Bitter from Carlsberg.

Courage launched John Smith’s Extra Smooth in February 1995 with adverts featuring comedian Jack Dee.

It made Courage £65 million in its first six months, selling in 7,000 pubs nationwide. (Daily Mirror, 29 August 1995.)

And Tadcaster brewery Samuel Smith announced that it was reducing its range of cask ales and replacing cask ale with nitrokeg in most of its London pubs. (What’s Brewing, August 1995.)

Before long, almost every brewery, from Greene King to J.W. Lees, had a nitrokeg bitter.

Nitrokeg: friend or foe?

For most of the late 1990s nitrokeg remained a hot topic in the industry, and among commentators.

The question was whether nitrokeg ales were:

1. stealing market share from cask ale, and thus endangering it, or
2. creating a new generation of bitter drinkers, while bringing additional trade to pubs.

In What’s Brewing for January 1995 Ted Bruning wrote about the risk of consumer confusion:

Landlords who try to pass off Bass’s new mixed- gas keg beer as a real ale have been slammed by campaigners… Caffrey’s is being pro- moted alongside real ales on guest beer chalkboards up and down the land… And while CAMRA’s liaison coordinator for Bass, John Hattersley, says that trade promotional material is clear that Caffrey’s is keg, branches have growing evidence of at best confusion and at worst deception.

National brewers did not do much to clear up any possible confusion. With 30 years’ hindsight, in fact, it looks very much as if they treated the emergence of this new category as an opportunity to muddle the definitions of cask and keg.

In an interview with The Licensee Whitbread’s marketing director Mike Dowell said of nitrokeg beer “It is neither cask nor keg, nor is it a substitute for the latter.” (Quoted in What’s Brewing, December 1994.)

And when Leisure Week ran a piece about the launch of John Smith’s Extra Smooth which referred to the “trend away from keg”, CAMRA protested that this was Courage propaganda. Because this beer was keg, even if it wasn’t “fizz”. (What’s Brewing, March 1995.)

In his editorial for the 1996 edition of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide Jeff Evans reported that sales of cask Bass were dropping primarily because of competition from the same brewer’s nitrokeg product, Caffrey’s.

Writing in the January 1996 edition of microbrewing industry magazine The Grist the anonymous columnist ‘Gabriel Oak’ said:

Are brewers completely barmy? Allied Domecq has given an incestuous ‘Award for Excellence’ to Tetley for the Yorkshire brewery’s development of the ‘Smooth Keg’ nitrogenated version of its cask bitter. Tetley Bitter in cask form is the biggest-selling standard bitter by far in Britain so why bother to bowdlerise it in keg form?… The reason is that big brewers are creatures of habit. They like the profit- able security of big volume brands. Cask ale has always been a double-edged sword for them: it gives them consumer credibility but it is completely low volume, low profit and perishable.

In the same issue drinks writer Andrew Barr, speaking to Peter Haydon, also focused on the economics of cask versus nitrokeg:

The current approach is that cask conditioned beer should be an accessible, low-cost, working man’s drink. Maybe that is wrong. Maybe cask conditioned beer should become more of an upmarket, prestige, high quality drink. Nitrokeg is more expensive than cask ale, surely something is not right. I am always amazed at the cheapness of real ale, not in respect of lager or keg, but relative to wine, or beer on the continent, or real ale in Belgium, and while the cheapness can frequently be reflected in the quality, the price/quality relationship has totally disappeared.

What if nitrokeg was nice?

Another point made by Andrew Barr in the interview quoted above was that, given its higher price, it might be that drinkers actually, maybe, possibly preferred nitrokeg.

CAMRA co-founder Graham Lees, writing in What’s Brewing for September 1995, argued that the variable quality of cask might be the problem:

There’s a new generation of beer drinkers out there who want to be part of the ale scene. If they’ve tried the stuff out of the handpumps there was probably a 50-50 chance it was lousy… But they don’t turn to lager, they keep trying: they opt for a smooth, cool, brewery-conditioned ale… It may not be brilliant, they think, but at least it’s better than warm tea.

In other words, nitrokeg might not be exciting, but it at at least consistent.

Alastair Hook, who later founded the early UK craft brewery Meantime, has never been afraid to take contrary positions. With his technical brewing hat on he wrote about nitrokeg in the March-April edition of The Grist:

CAMRA and the anti-nitrokeg lobby have [criticised nitrokeg]… Although I can agree with their fundamental points I do feel however that all the qualities of nitrokeg are being tarred with the same dismissive brush. Regardless of what any critic might say there is a lot right with these beers. The texture is appealing: silky, creamy and smooth. A fine head (people do look at what they drink), coolness (not necessarily too cold), clarity, lack of gassy body and a gentle action on the palate are all qualities of nitrokeg that would be seen as assets on many beers…

What happened next

Excitement over Caffrey’s died down, inevitably, but nitrokeg became part of the pub landscape. 

In 2001 drinks writer Ben McFarland wrote a retrospective about the rise of nitrokeg beers for The Morning Advertiser which included this startling statement about sales of John Smith Extra Smooth:

Volume sales have more than doubled over the past eight years and it now boasts a 31 per cent share of a nitrokeg market worth £1.4bn.

When we started paying attention in pubs in around 2003, most of them stocked at least one nitrokeg bitter. Some had several.

We had friends and acquaintances who drank John Smith’s out of choice because they wanted a beer that was unobtrusive, cool and, yes, smooth.

Others used it as a fallback when there was no cask ale on offer – or when the cask was especially dodgy. They preferred cask ale but weren’t evangelical about it. As far as they were concerned, there wasn’t all that much difference, when push came to shove.

According statistics from CGA, published in The Morning Advertiser, the best-selling draught bitters of 2004, based on the number of outlets, were:

1. John Smith’s Extra Smooth
2. Tetley’s Smoothflow
3. Worthington Creamflow
4. Boddington’s Draughtflow
5. Fuller’s London Pride (cask)

In a sense, though, the 1990s critics of nitrokeg were right. As the novelty wore off, the marketing died down, and many of the beers became weaker, enthusiasm for them began to wane.

It’s not that John Smith’s Extra Smooth had disappeared. We still find ourselves drinking a few pints a year, especially when we’re exploring less trendy boozers on our #EveryPubInBristol mission.

But our impression (we’d love to see an update on those 2004 numbers) is that there’s less of it about – and that almost anybody who drinks it is a creature of habit who has probably been doing so since the 1990s.

Keg by any other name

One final thought: would the resistance to craft keg from cask ale diehards have been anywhere near as vehement if nitrokeg hadn’t happened?

Reading all these old sources from the 1990s there’s a palpable sense of anxiety in the conversation around nitrokeg. They thought they’d won when Watney’s Red Barrel disappeared.

And now, keg beer was back, in a more insidious form. A form that was worryingly acceptable. That some people even liked to drink, found to be an acceptable substitute for cask ale, and considered pretty hip, too.

Then, after more than a decade of fighting that battle, with limited success, along comes yet another kind of keg beer. One that is trendier again and which, this time, is held up by many as being better than cask ale.

No wonder things got testy for a while.

Anyway, that’s enough of that. We’re off for a pint of Caffrey’s.