Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

Guiness beer is famous for its smooth and creamy texture, thanks in part to nitrogen, and also a simplistically brilliant little device called the Guinness widget.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Do you want to see into the future? Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? Do you want to experience the frontiers of what makes us human? On Tech Stuff, we travel from the minds of Congo to the surface of Mars, from conversations with Nobel Prize winners

to the depths of TikTok, to ask burning questions about technology, from high tech to low culture and everywhere in between. Join us. Listen to Tech Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we're talking short stuff today. We're talking widgets on short stuff, I should say.

Widgets that were first introduced as a concept from a play, right, Chuck? Yeah, I mean, there was the word, first of all, we need to thank our old buddy Brian Didsbury. Oh, right. Uh, the boom operator on the Stuff You Should Know TV show. So great. Who comes to our live shows, still a friend. He texts me all the time, trying to get me to play

Red Dead Redemption with him online. He texts me Simpsons quotes. Does he really? Mm-hmm. Oh, did he text you about this too? No. Oh, okay. Yeah, he texted me a couple of days ago and he's like, hey, man, how about one on the

Guinness widget? I was like, done, buddy. It's a good idea, for sure. It is. And thanks to Guinness.com, HowStuffWorks, a conversable economist, a petroleum service company. Where else? YouTube? Yeah. That's pretty much it. Okay. Anyway, widgets. Everybody thinks it's basically a spinoff of the word gadget, which

is probably true. We don't know the true etymology, but I believe it was in a play in 1924 where they specifically in the play talked about like we're in the widget business and that may be like the first time that anyone had ever used it like that. But then Guinness came along and said, well, you know what, everyone talks about widgets is just a thing you make, a nameless thing you make at any company. We're going to make a real thing and we're really going to call it a widget and get it patented as such. Yeah.

And they did. It's this thing that makes canned Guinness much more like Guinness from the tap, which is actually much more like Guinness from a cask because Guinness is its own kind of thing as a matter of fact. And I say we dig into how Guinness is Guinness. That's right. I think we should prep people. This simple, simple little short stuff was a cause of a lot of emails and consternation between us today, right? Is it simple?

I think so. All right. Well, I think you should take the lead then. It's basically a ping pong ball. Oh, yes, the widget is simple, right? So let's talk about what we're talking about. If you open a can of Guinness, and just the can, it's not in the bottle, there's a little plastic sphere with a hole in the bottom

that you will hear rattling around the can. If you cut the can open, very gently set one aside, and then be very careful holding the other one up because it's a sliced can, they're very dangerous. And look inside, you'll see this little plastic sphere. That is the Guinness widget. And there's no one. You can play ping pong with it even.

It's not that big, is it? Nah, it looks a little smaller. But could you though, does it have bounce to it? I doubt it, because it's not full of air. Okay. And it's heavier. I was just making a joke. Okay. Well, I didn't know. I could see that being like a thing that the internet figured out. I bet they've done that in Ireland. And by the way,

Guinness calls these officially within the Guinness company. They call it a smoothifier. Okay. So everybody else calls it a widget then? Yeah. Okay. So, they put this in there, and only God Himself knows how they work. Well, let's talk a little bit about a guy named Michael Ash. In 1951, Michael Ash joined the Guinness Company. He was a mathematician.

He was a master brewer. He was a mathematician, he was a master brewer. He was a big believer in science. And he was like, hey, there's all these beers that are made with carbon dioxide, and it's that CO2 that dissolves in the beer that makes it fizzy when you open it up. When the can is closed, the pressure inside is much higher than the pressure outside.

So when you open that thing up, there's a pressure drop, and the agitation of pouring it makes that CO2 come bubbling out, and that's where you get your foamy head on a beer. He was like, this cask Guinness is smooth and creamy, and CO2 just doesn't do it if we're going to try and put this stuff in pubs and eventually in cans. No, no So the if you have a cask The beer that's put into the cask it Ages in the cask like when you deliver it to a pub It's still doing its thing aging and once you tap the cask you have three days to drink it

That's how like unpasteurized and new it is but the thing is is when you get the beer out of the cask, you have to actually pump it out. And that creates like a totally different pour and finish than if you're pouring it out of a keg. So because the world kind of transitioned from casks to kegs around the middle of the 20th century, Michael Ashe was like, well then what can we do

to make Guinness more cask-like or keep its cask-like profile and look and taste and everything, and he figured out that adding nitrogen is what would do that. That's right, and you know what? I think that's a good little cliffhanger. Okay. So let's take a break and we'll talk about the magic

inside the Guinness can and glass right after this. Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Osvaldo Oshin, one of the new hosts of the long-running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical but obsessively intrigued. And I'm Kara Price, the other new host. And I'm ready to adopt early and often. On Tech Stuff, we travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars

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Hey, this is Lexi Brown, WNBA player and professional yapper. And this is Mariah Rose, you may know me from spilling the tea on Hoops for Hotties on TikTok. And we've got a new podcast, full circle. Every Wednesday, we're catching you up on what's going on in women's basketball. And not just in the WNBA, but with Athletes Unlimited, Unrivaled, and college basketball. We've got you with analysis, inside stories, and a little bit of tea. I know you guys have seen a lot of former and current basketball players telling their stories from their point of view, and I just think it's time for the girlies to tap in. We want to share all of the women's basketball stories that you won't see anywhere else.

Tune in to Full Circle, an iHeart Women's Sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You can find us on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. reports. All right. So where we left off, Michael Ash had discovered that nitrogen, along with it, it doesn't replace the CO2. It's a mixture of the carbon dioxide and nitrogen. But nitrogen isn't absorbed into the beer like carbon dioxide is.

So it has the same pressure of just a regular beer, but it has a lot less CO2, and so it's not as fizzy, which is not what you want out of a Guinness anyway, because that nitrogen is making up a great deal of that pressure inside the can. Yes, and even though it's harder for nitrogen to dissolve inside beer, CO2, it's very easy, nitrogen will, some will dissolve, and it forms smaller bubbles and more stable bubbles.

So when you pour this nitrogen infused Guinness beer, the head will be foamier, much creamier than say like a CO2 lager head that eventually kind of settles down and looks like urine in a glass after a while, especially if you're talking about Coors banquet beer. This is like a foamy head that, because the nitrogen bubbles are more stable, stays around way longer too. So we figured out by adding nitrogen, you can basically replicate the look and the feel and the taste of cask-pored Guinness like it used to be. That's right.

So the next step was like, how do I make this happen in a can? It seemed like an impossibility until a guy named John Lunn, L-U-N-N, a master distiller, created the widget. The patent, I believe Guinness eventually filed for the patent in 69 for an improved method of and means of dispensing carbonated liquids from containers. It began as Project Dynamite, but apparently there was a lot of that was problematic for customs

because it said Project Dynamite on all the paperwork and stuff. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah. So they changed it to Project Oak Tree. They changed it to Project Dino-Mite. Right. They changed it to Project Oak Tree. They changed it to Project Dino Mike. Right. They changed it to Project Nuclear Waste. No, Project Oak Tree, I think, was a reference to the original Project Acorn from Guinness.

So they wanted to get these cans right. You can get Guinness in a bottle, but it's not the same beer at all. It's a completely different beer. So you like the can version better, huh? Oh, yeah, that's the pub version. I might not be doing it right then, because I'm like, what is this crap?

I would rather just drink the Guinness out of a bottle any day of the week. I mean, do you like Guinness in a pub? I don't know that I've ever actually had real Guinness in a pub. Oh, Josh. I'm taking you to England next week. Okay, that'd be awesome.

You're like, really? That just surprises me. I must not have poured it correctly because it doesn't make any sense that they would even go to this trouble of putting a widget in it to make worse Guinness than it is in the bottle. So I just didn't do it right. That's my guess. Well, maybe you just don't understand the concept of Guinness. I mean, Guinness is supposed to go down like a milk and not a fizzy carbonated beverage. They call it the surge and settle. It pours in and you just see it gently falling to the bottom and you get this milky foam at the top.

The cascade. Yeah, and like that's why I could always drink a lot of Guinness because it didn't fill you up and make you super gassy and burpy. Wow, so I've been doing the opposite because drinking a single bottle of Guinness is like eating a whole loaf of bread to me. Yeah, the bottle is completely different.

Wow, okay, so I gotta try this other version because what you're talking about is basically the opposite of the Guinness I'm familiar with. Oh, wow. That is, that's funny. Like I really want to try it. Like you've just blown my mind. Yeah.

Oh man, go out and get a four pack and crack the can open and then just dump it in the glass as hard as you can. Just turn it upside down. Okay. And it won't overflow or anything. It'll get to the top and just stop and then just dump it in the glass as hard as you can. Just turn it upside down. Okay. And it won't overflow or anything. It'll get to the top and just stop and then start settling. Well, there's this other thing they have now too that I guess kind of takes the whole thing into a new level. It's called nitro surge. Yeah, I saw that.

You put it on top of a can and it does the pouring like it would from a cask as far as I understand, right there at home or in the parking lot of a convenience store. Yeah, I saw the Nitro Surge. I don't think they sell them here yet, but I think it's like a mechanical device. Does it have a battery in it even? I'm not fully sure. I stopped looking into it when I realized how much further it was taking me away from the widget.

You know what I mean? Oh yeah, I forgot we were talking about the widget. All right, let's get back to the widget. So the widget is a little plastic ball, and I think this is where we got hung up earlier. I don't know if you saw my most recent email. I think it's a matter of semantics because I kept saying that the, and Guinness on their website says it's a nitrogen-filled sphere. And you're like, it's not filled with nitrogen. I think it's just semantics because they don't literally fill this ball with nitrogen

and then drop it in the can. Okay. Some people say they do. It is because it has a hole in it. It's, you drop it in there and then fill the can with nitrogen and then that ball fills up with nitrogen and beer. Gotcha. I got you. And it stays in this tiny, it's basically a little mini turbo jet.

So when you crack that beer, it's a little mini ball with higher pressure than the rest, within even what's inside the rest of the can. And so when you crack that beer and all that pressure changes, just like a regular beer, it comes shooting out of that little tiny hole in the plastic ball and provides this little extra boost of nitrogen, like a little beer jet, agitating everything to create even more bubbles. Right, but the specific kind of nitrogen bottles that make Guinness Guinness, which are smaller and more stable.

So you get that foamy, creamy head and the cascade and all that. I get it. I get it. Yeah. All right. He did a great job. I think it was the semantical thing.

When people say it's filled with nitrogen, it is, but as a virtue of the canning process, they don't like fill it up and go like, quick throw it in there. Right. You have to hold it just right. Put your thumb over the hole and and just throw it in and put the top of the can on really quick.

Yeah, it's really ingenious though. I mean it's got this tiny little hole and imagine a little ball filled with like nitrogen infused beer being jetted out of this tiny little hole as you're pouring, as you open and pouring this beer. It's so simple, it's ingenious and so ingenious that in 2004 they did a survey of almost 9,000 people and they voted that the Guinness widget was a greater invention than the internet. Right. And they're wrong, but I get the point for sure.

I mean, it's something to put on your website. I guess it depends which version of the internet you're talking about, you know? Let me ask you this. Have you ever had any, like, cream stouts? Yeah. Like, Bodingtons or Murphys or any of those? Yes. Okay.

But just not the Guinness. Like, I just associated a stout with, like, oh, I just had dinner three hours ago. I can't drink a stout because I'll throw up. I'll be too full. No, I think that's, to my mind, it's a misnomer, because stout sounds heavy, because it's a big dark beer. But it's because it's not heavily carbonated, like a lager, like it doesn't fill you up like that. It doesn't make you gassy and burpy,

it's like drinking a big thick milk, which may make you feel full, but it's not from, like gassy full. Okay, we're getting tripped up by semantics again. It to me, yeah, the big milky thing, if I drank a big glass of milk after I ate, I would probably throw up. So it's the same thing in that sense,

but no, it's not making me like Coors Banquet beer would, whatever, burpy or whatever. It doesn't fill you up in that sense, it like literally fills you up. or like Coors Banquipi or whatever, Burpee or whatever. It doesn't fill you up in that sense, it like literally fills you up. I got you. So yeah, I think we're talking about the same thing. Well, now I'm worried that I have experienced Guinness like you're supposed to,

and there's not like a whole world out there for me to try. Well, you may not like it. I'll try it for sure. I haven't, I mean, I don't drink a lot of beer anymore, period. And I went through a big Guinness phase in the 90s, starting in college and through New Jersey. And in fact, that brings me to another little factoid here. The Guinness uses a floating widget since 1997. And I was like, oh, that explains it.

Because in the 90s, we cut open the can because we were like, what is that in there? And it was fixed to the bottom of the can. So it was pre-97 and during COVID with supply issues, they fixed it to the bottom of the can then as well. But otherwise it's been a floating widget. When'd you have been freaked out when you cut the can open and you found the thing just fixed to the bottom of the can

looking back up at you and blink? Yeah, like a little Irish eyeball. Right. One other thing, though, I noticed on this list, Old Speckled Hen uses widgets, too, which I didn't know. That used to be one of my fave beers for a while. Yeah, and the Boddingtons, Murphys, Beamish, Tetleys, what else, Wexford, Bellhaven.

And I'm sure we've missed some, but they all use the widget technology to deliver that pub drawn flavor to your lips. Right there at home. Yep, this episode of Short Stuff brought to you by Coors Banquet Beer. Yeah, I doubt that. You got anything else?

I got nothing else, I'm sure we got some stuff wrong. There's some beer aficionados that are like, not quite right, guys. Whatever. I think you should say the thing. Okay. Short Stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

you listen to your favorite shows.