The Silk Road

It's always nice when the breweries come up with blog post ideas for me, so shout-out to Carlow Brewing and Hope for simultaneously releasing nitrogenated stouts in a can. I'm not the world's biggest fan of nitrogenated stout in a can, but who could resist a little side-by-side tasting action?

Without prejudice, I opened the O'Hara's Irish Stout first. There was a satisfying hiss from the depressurising widget. Once settled it looked just like a short-filled pint, so they seem to have got the technicals right. Both the aroma and flavour are far from dead, with rich milk chocolate in the former and a tangy spinach bitterness in the latter. It finishes on an espresso roast too, so O'Hara's-Stout-as-we-know-it is done no disservice by the nitrogen here. It's a daftly long time since I last drank this beer, but this matches well with my memory of it. It's maybe not quite as smooth as draught nitro stout, though again that's something I also haven't had in a long time, and I enjoyed the very faint sparkle. This is very well made and should do well out in the mainstream.

The other has no such ambitions. Hope Nitro Stout is No. 23 in the Limited Edition series, so I guess won't be around for long. There's no widget but it still surged and swirled, albeit briefly. The head was nowhere near as stable, however, and was beginning to fade by the time I'd typed this much of the review. It has the edge on the O'Hara's regarding ABV, at 4.8%. The aroma -- again, hooray: there is one -- is untypical for Irish stout. It's herbal and savoury; interesting rather than unpleasant. That translates to a substantial bitterness on tasting. 44 IBUs, the can helpfully tells us, but I would believe more. The flavour is tobacco, kale, bitumen and very very dark chocolate. Unsurprisingly there's much more sparkle than the other one, so you don't really get your money's worth from the nitrogen. But it's a lovely old-fashioned bitter stout of the sort I like. Breweries don't make enough of these so I give it a completely free pass on the gas mechanics.

The similarities here are purely superficial, and the respective beers are intended to perform different tasks for different audiences. As such, it doesn't really make sense to compare them. The character, complexity and big ol' bitterness of the Hope one endeared it to me in particular. If it's the nitrokeg experience that you're after, however, O'Hara's your man.