So what is a widget you ask?

A widget is a small, hollow device within your beer that releases gas to make your beer taste fresher, fizzier and hold a stronger flavour for longer like a craft beer would. It manages the characteristics of the beers head. These widgets can be floating or fixed to the can or glass so when you open a can of your favourite beer (from Dranken.co.uk 😉).

Guinness was the first brand to have a widget in their beer, they tested it out and felt it improved their famous Irish brew, it would seem they set a trend as from here all beer brands started to adopt this feature for an improved taste. Since then Guinness have always had widgets in their cans and bottles until Covid caused a shortage of widgets and they could no longer source them, as a brand they quickly got on top of the issue and managed to fix this by the start of 2021 meaning their beer is back to normal with its usual refreshing and flavorsome taste. Shop Guinness here.

As we have spoken about before there are so many different glasses to have your favourite beer in but when you're in the pub and your beer is served to you with bubbles floating to the top it means the widget in your glass is doing it's job properly. These widgets are slightly different to the ones you get in a can but they serve the same purpose, they are engraved by a laser and usually have the date engraved too. This leads on to my next point, widgets in a glass have an age and as they age they begin to wear away and don't work as well, the newer your glass is the more bubbles and fizz your beer will have.

The importance of the widget isn't to be underestimated, it won the Queen's UK award for technological achievement in 1991. If it's good enough for the queen it's good enough for us.