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.