Nitrokeg stout: From Guinness to Murphys & Kernel
With the Six Nations rugby concluding (sponsored by Guinness if you don’t watch) stories about a shortage of Guinness seems to have stopped.
I’m not a fan of nitrokeg Guinness. I remain enough of a CAMRA fundamentalist to prefer bottled versions.
There are Big Beer alternatives from Heineken, Murphys and now Beamish.
Heineken reported a 632% jump in Murphys sales in December 2024 with an extra 300 pubs stocking it.
There are of course Indy alternatives. Probably the best known is Anspach and Hobday’s London Black, a nitrokeg porter at 4.4%. Ive enjoyed occasional pints. Its also in a nitro pour can
Leading craft brewer Kernel have also started selling a nitrokeg London Stout at 4.65%. I tried a pint in the Tottenham High Cross at the weekend. It was slightly swee,t, creamy with a good roasty hit. In short to my palate much easier to enjoy and drink than nitrokeg Guinness. It was £6.50 a pint btw
Verdant have also launched a nitrokeg stout although at the moment in its local Cornwall market.
I came across Wye Valley’s nitrokeg stout Nightjar in Abergavenny recently and looking at the breweries map of where to find it, its on numbers of bars across Wales and the West Midlands.
That leaves the question of cask. There are plenty of cask stouts and other categories of dark beer out there. In theory getting on the bar should be easier as while many pubs are tied on keg, that’s often not the case with cask.
Can cask stout and dark beer compete with nitro? Matthew Curtis writing in What’s Brewing argues it can:
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