For Issue 4 (Winter 2014/2015) of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine™, we talked with Left Hand Brewing Company VP of Brewing Operations, Joe Schiraldi, about their approach to capturing nitro in a bottle.
Craft Beer & Brewing: Why did Left Hand decide to focus so heavily on bottling nitrogenated milk stout?
Left Hand Brewing: We’ve been brewing and serving nitrogenated milk stout since the turn of the millennium. At first, it was served only in our tasting room. The next phase was to make the nitro draft more accessible. Once we were confident we had the correct process control in place, we started sending the beer to draft accounts. At one point in the late 2000s, there was a grassroots uprising from our team members who pushed for us to bottle it. There was very little existing information on how to do this, and the technology was still evolving, so we spent most of our cognitive power for a solid eighteen months trying to solve the problem of how to do it. If you’re interested in learning about something like dry hopping, you could spend a lifetime reading up on it. But that information isn’t available for nitrogenated beers. It took a lot of trial and error, punches in the face, and kicks in the gut to figure it out.