When Three Sheeps Brewing Company founder and head brewmaster Grant Pauly and his colleagues finally figured out how to bottle the hardest beer they’ve ever made, Cashmere Hammer, he couldn’t help but be excited for another.
The Sheboygan-based brewery’s brew is particularly unique because of one property: nitrogen. Cashmere Hammer is a nitro rye stout, meaning that the beer is carbonated with nitrogen, rather than the standard carbon dioxide used to carbonate beer.
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What makes brewing with nitrogen so difficult — and subsequently makes finding nitro beers so hard — is the near-perfect process that is necessary in production. Sam Hennessee, a brewmaster with Titletown Brewing Company, detailed the process that goes into making their seasonal nitrogenated beer, the Bridge Out Stout.
The nitrogen is combined with a small amount of carbon dioxide when carbonated, and the nitrogen is pushed through a special faucet to make sure the bubbles come through perfectly, Hennessee said.
This process has to be perfect, and since the beer has to use a lower pressure volume, the batch can be easily ruined. Normal beers are carbonated to about 2.2 to 2.8 volumes, Hennessee said, but a nitro brew is carbonated to about 1.9 volumes. This results in a long process. If one overdoes the levels, complete decarbonation is required, which is an even longer process, Hennessee said.
But, if done correctly, the resulting beer is one that tastes distinctly different from your typical stout.
“Using nitrogen to make [Titletown Brewing Company], it creates a much more crisp, creamy and smooth beer,” Hennessee said. “There’s some bubbliness to it, but not much. It’s really a quite easy drinking beverage that has just such a rich creaminess to it.”
Bridge Out Stout is only served on draft in Titletown’s tap room because the process for bottling nitro beers is incredibly intense.
At 3 Sheeps, it took a lot of trial and error to get the process right. As only one of three breweries that bottles a nitro beer, Pauly said, there were not many resources available on the process.
But, when they were ultimately successful, they couldn’t help but make two. In addition to the Cashmere Hammer, 3 Sheeps also has a nitro beer exclusive to their tap room, the Seven Legged Cartwheel. Pauly described it as a wild pale ale, vastly different from Cashmere Hammer.
“The Cartwheel has strong flavors of mango and pineapple, giving it a really unique and distinct flavor,” Pauly said. “When it’s combined with the nitrogen, you really can push the mango taste through, and it’s a lot less bitter than it would be with just normal carbon dioxide.”
While the brewery is excited to have finally mastered the process, they aren’t eager to expand availability, Pauly said.
“I’m really jonesing for us to get another one like this in distribution,” Pauly said. “But we really don’t want to have too many beers out there like this one.”
While the Cashmere Hammer could be their only nitro beer in distribution for a while, it will be great to see what Pauly and the 3 Sheep team come up with for their next nitro. In the meantime, Cashmere Hammer just landed here in Madison in mid-October, so I decided to give it a taste.
Style
Stout, 6.5 percent
Aroma
Faint notes of toast and rye from the malts, not very intense.
Appearance
Deep chocolate brown with a tan head
Taste
Chocolate backbone comes through strong, but it has an almost milkshake taste on the tongue
Room Temperature Taste
Bitterness in the malts comes through stronger
Consensus
This was a very interesting beer. Having never had a nitro before, I was expecting it to be similar to other stouts, but I must say this was much smoother and creamier than a lot of stouts I’ve tried.
