Yes — carbonated coffee. But that doesn’t mean your coffee is going to tickle your nose like soda or an IPA; those beverages are carbonated with carbon dioxide. Nitrogen carbonation creates microbubbles that create an entirely different experience than CO2 bubbles.
Perhaps the beverage most well-known as being carbonated with nitrogen is Guinness. If you’ve ever had a Guinness stout pulled properly from the tap, you’ll recognize the signature “waterfall” effect of the nitrogen right away in your freshly pulled nitro cold brew coffee. This is created when the microbubbles of nitrogen push their way up through the beverage and make their way back out to the atmosphere. It looks like sheets of water are falling inside the glass (they kind of are), like a waterfall or heavy rain falling down window panes. It’s a little moment of meditation and beauty with your morning coffee.
Other than having a beautiful effect and creating the luscious mouthfeel nitro cold brew is known for, nitrogenating has another benefit: prolonged freshness. Just like how wine starts to oxidize and “go bad” when the bottle sits open and is exposed to oxygen over time, coffee will oxidize and lose its flavor. American University chemistry professor Matt Hartings told WBUR, “When you bubble nitrogen through, you get rid of any oxygen that’s in your coffee. And so you preserve all these flavors that might not be there otherwise.”
