Homeless in Vancouver: What’s nitro beer got against cow tipping?

My friend the Green Guy found some beer—a few tall cans and some bottles of a local micro brew called N2 Nitrogenated Milk Stout.

He came to me with a question about the N2.

He didn’t know  what a “milk stout” might be or why it might need to be nitrogenated but he wasn’t asking me about any of that, which was just as well as I hadn’t much of a clue either.

He was curious about two instructions on the back of the bottle. One said “Invert 180° to pour” but the other said, “Do not invert to pour”.

Why did one contradict the other he wanted to know.

He was ignoring the little images associated with the instructions. Taken together they were telling the user, on the one hand, to invert the bottle 180° to pour the beer but, on the other hand, not to invert cows. It was a visual joke—no cow tipping. Ha…ha…ha…[cough].

Bubble, bubble, worth the trouble?

Turns out the brewers, Parallel 49, located in East Vancouver, really are serious about the first instruction. They’ve even got a YouTube video on how to correctly pour the beer. The cow gag is really just there to buffer the serious message with some hip irony.

Pouring the beer straight down is apparently necessary to get the full benefits nitrogen can impart to a beer: a creamy texture and sweet taste.

An American brewer, the Left Hand Brewing Company of Colorado, prints an emphatic exhortation on the cap of ever bottle of its nitro-charged milk stout: “Pour Hard.”

I think nitrogen makes smaller bubbles than carbon dioxide, which would explain the “creaminess”.

Sounds more like a port wine than a beer

Guinness Irish dry stout is infused with the same percentages of nitrogen (70 percent) and carbon dioxide (30 percent) as milk stouts like N2 but I’d be hard-pressed to describe Guinness as having any sweetness. All I remember is a dark beer with a savage taste that suggested fizzy cigarette butts.

N2 is described as being sweet and creamy with chocolate notes, which sounds rather like a dessert wine and rather unlike a beer.

Even sounds tasty to me—a person who doesn’t enjoy the taste of beer.

Thanks to a commenter, I now stand corrected about the “milk” in milk stout. It is from dairy—lactose to be specific. So perhaps the references to “creaminess” refers to more than just the “creamy” mouthiness of the fine nitrogen bubbles.

Still, I take the talk of sweetness and chocolate flavours with a big grain of salt. These will be subtleties at best I’m sure.

To my undiscerning taste buds, beer has always tasted like beer, unless you smother it to death with something else.

Just like Fruli strawberry wheat beer, where the strawberry flavour is so dominant it just tastes like a sweet carbonated strawberry beverage.

I may be skeptical about the tasty claims for milk stouts but I won’t really know until I try some.

I should add that I’ve never seen N2 before. It was first released in December 2013. It’s a nitrogen-charged version of the carbonated Ugly Sweater milk stout, which is also made by the Parallel 49 Brewing Company.

I see empties for Ugly Sweater all the time—all the Parallel 49 beers are very popular in Vancouver.

As for cow tipping…not real. The rural equivalent of an urban legend—cows can’t hold plates let alone wait on tables. But Smart car tipping…that’s real!