Guinness

• 1. Introduction

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  Guinness begins with a very long lease. On the 31st of December 1759, Arthur Guinness signed for an unused brewery at St. James's Gate in Dublin. The term was 9,000 years, at £45 per annum. From that rented building came a stout that is now brewed in almost 50 countries and available in over 120. Sales in 2011 alone amounted to 850,000,000 litres. How did one man's long lease turn into one of the most successful alcohol brands anywhere? Why does a proper pint take two minutes to pour, and why do its bubbles seem to sink? And who put a toucan on its posters?

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• 2. Porter to Public Company

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  Arthur Guinness started brewing ales at St. James's Gate in 1759, and he began selling porter in 1778. The brewery would grow into one of the largest in the British Empire. For most of its history the range stayed narrow. There were three variations of a single beer type, namely porter or stout in single, double or extra strengths, plus a foreign stout for export.

  The 1840s brought the first Guinness beers to use the word 'stout', called Single Stout and Double Stout. The word had originally described a beer's strength. Eventually its meaning shifted toward body and colour. Porter also went by the name 'plain', as in the refrain of Flann O'Brien's poem 'The Workman's Friend': 'A pint of plain is your only man.'

  Between 1868 and 1876, Guinness sales soared from 350,000 barrels to 779,000 barrels. The firm was already one of the top three British and Irish brewers. In October 1886 it became a public company, averaging 1.138 million barrels of sales a year.

  That flotation came despite the brewery's refusal to advertise or to offer its beer at a discount. Guinness owned no public houses either. Even so, the company was valued at £6 million, and its shares were 20 times oversubscribed. On the first day of trading, the share price rose to a 60 per cent premium.

  By 1914, Guinness was producing 2.652 million barrels of beer a year. That was more than double the output of its nearest competitor, Bass. It also supplied more than 10 per cent of the entire UK beer market. Behind that output sat quality control efforts the brewery pioneered, and one of them still carries a pseudonym.

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• 3. Science, Welfare, War

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  In 1899, the brewery hired a statistician named William Sealy Gosset. He published under the pseudonym 'Student'. The techniques he developed for Guinness, particularly Student's t-distribution and the even better known Student's t-test, made him lastingly famous.

  By 1900, the brewery was running welfare schemes for its 5,000 employees that were considered unparalleled. By 1907 they were costing £40,000 a year, which was one-fifth of the total wages bill. Sir John Lumsden suggested and supervised the improvements. Guinness also kept a fleet of ships, barges and yachts.

  Generosity had limits, though. Before 1939, a Guinness brewer who wished to marry a Catholic was asked to resign. Writing in the Irish Independent, Thomas Molloy summed up the policy this way: 'It had no qualms about selling drink to Catholics but it did everything it could to avoid employing them until the 1960s.'

  When World War I broke out in 1914, employees at the St. James Brewery were encouraged to join the British forces. More than 800 did. Soldiers' families were paid half wages, and jobs were guaranteed on their return. Of those 800 men, 103 did not come back.

  In 1932, at the start of the Anglo-Irish trade war, Guinness moved its headquarters to London. During World War II, British demand for the stout was one of the main reasons the UK lifted commerce restrictions it had imposed on Ireland in 1941. Those restrictions had been meant to force Ireland into supporting the Allied Powers. In the middle of the 20th century, the recipe itself was about to gain a new ingredient.

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• 4. Chemistry of a Pint

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  Five ingredients go into Guinness stout: water, malted barley, roasted barley, hops and brewer's yeast. Roasting part of the barley gives the stout its dark colour and its characteristic taste. The unmalted roasted barley is a relatively modern addition to the grain mix. The beer is pasteurised and filtered.

  For many years, a portion of aged brew was blended with freshly brewed beer to add a sharp lactic acid flavour. A characteristic tang survives today. The company has refused to confirm whether that blending still happens.

  Diageo marketing calls Guinness 'the black stuff'. Officially, though, its colour is described as a very dark shade of ruby.

  A 2003 study suggested that stouts such as Guinness might help reduce the deposit of harmful cholesterol on artery walls. The effect was attributed to higher antioxidant levels in stouts than in lagers. The health benefits of antioxidants have since been called into question. Diageo's own position is plain: 'We never make any medical claims for our drinks.'

  Until the late 1950s, Guinness was still racked into wooden casks. Then the brewery stopped making cask-conditioned beers and developed a keg system. Aluminium kegs replaced the wooden casks, and the nickname for them was 'iron lungs'.

  For years, brewing Guinness involved isinglass, a fining agent made from fish bladders that helped settle suspended yeast particles in the vat. It stayed in the floor of the vat, but minute quantities might be carried into the beer. In the late 2010s, Diageo introduced a new filtration process that avoided isinglass. That made the stout suitable for vegetarians and vegans.

  In 1959, Guinness began using nitrogen, arguably its biggest change to date. Michael Ash, a mathematician turned brewer, had discovered the mechanism that made it possible. Nitrogen bubbles are much smaller than carbon dioxide bubbles. They give a creamier, smoother consistency in place of a sharper, traditional carbonated taste.

  Nitrogen is less soluble than carbon dioxide, so the beer can be held under high pressure without turning fizzy. Forcing draught beer through fine holes in a plate in the tap produces the characteristic 'surge'. In cans and bottles, a widget does the same job. It is a small plastic ball containing nitrogen. Foreign Extra Stout contains more carbon dioxide, which gives it a more acidic taste.

  Before the 1960s, all beer leaving the brewery was cask-conditioned. Casks delivered to small pubs were often nearly unmanageably frothy, but cellar space and fast turnover meant they had to be tapped quickly. So a glass was part filled with frothy beer, left to stand for a minute, then topped up from a cask that had been pouring longer.

  When nitrogen dispensing arrived in the 1960s, it was felt important to keep this two-stage ritual so that drinkers would accept the change. The beer has not been cask-conditioned for decades, so the two-stage pour has since been labelled a marketing ploy that does not affect taste. Diageo still recommends a double pour that should take two minutes.

  The brewer recommends serving draught Guinness at 6-7 °C, and Extra Cold Guinness at 3.5 °C. Before the 21st century, cellar temperature of about 13 °C was popular, and most drinkers preferred room temperature of about 20 °C. According to Esquire magazine, the server should hold a slightly tulip-shaped pint glass at 45 degrees under the tap and fill it three-quarters full.

  On the way out of the tap, the beer is forced at high speed through a five-hole disc restrictor plate. The friction creates small nitrogen bubbles that form a creamy head. After the initial pour settles, the server pushes the tap handle back and tops up until the head forms a slight dome, just proud of the rim. Guinness recommends taking gulps rather than sips, to avoid the bitter taste of the nitrogen foam.

  In 2010, Guinness redesigned its pint glass for the first time in a decade. The new glass was taller and narrower, with a bevel design. Since 2018, a drinking game called 'splitting the G' has had an entry on the Urban Dictionary website. Players try to bring the liquid to rest at a set level against the G in the glass's branding.

  A study published in 2012 explained why bubbles in a pint of Guinness seem to travel downwards. Bubbles that touch the glass wall are slowed by drag. Bubbles in the centre rise freely and pull surrounding beer upward with them. Beer near the outside then falls, carrying the wall bubbles down.

  The study found that the effect comes from the shape of the glass combined with the small bubbles of stout. If a vessel widens with height, as a standard pint glass does, bubbles sink along the walls. In an anti-pint, which narrows with height, they rise along the walls instead. The harp beside that G, which drinkers also use as a marker in the game, has a history of its own.

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• 5. Selling the Black Stuff

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  In 1862, the proprietor Benjamin Lee Guinness adopted a harp as the company's emblem. It was modelled on the Trinity College harp, which is the national symbol of Ireland. Harps have stood for Ireland at least since the reign of Henry VIII. Guinness registered its harp as a trademark shortly after the Trade Marks Registration Act 1875. It faces right rather than left, which distinguishes it from the Irish coat of arms.

  Falling sales in the 1930s pushed Guinness into prominent marketing campaigns, from television advertisements to beer mats and posters. The most recognisable series came from the agency S. H. Benson in the 1930s and 1940s, mostly drawn by the artist John Gilroy. The posters carried phrases such as 'Guinness for Strength', 'Lovely Day for a Guinness' and 'Guinness Makes You Strong'. Another was 'My Goodness My Guinness', or 'My Goodness, My Christmas, It's Guinness!'

  The most famous slogan was 'Guinness Is Good for You'. It stemmed from market research in the 1920s, when people told the company they felt good after their pint. Dorothy L. Sayers is credited with creating it. Modern alcohol advertising rules prohibit such claims in Ireland, yet vintage artefacts with the slogans remain common in Irish pubs.

  Gilroy's posters often featured animals such as a kangaroo, an ostrich, a seal and a lion. The toucan became as much a symbol of Guinness as the harp. A 1940s advertisement ran with this jingle: 'Toucans in their nests agree/Guinness is good for you/Try some today and see/What one or toucan do.' Sayers and R. A. Bevan were copywriters at Benson's. A biography of Sayers notes that she sketched the toucan and wrote several of the adverts. Pastiche booklets illustrated by Ronald Ferns now fetch high prices among collectors.

  In 1983, amid declining sales, Guinness made a conscious decision to turn its stout into a 'cult' beer in the UK. The move halted the decline. The Guardian described a brand built in opposition to cheap lagers and session drinking. Its drinkers were pictured as quiet bar-room intellectuals with a pint and a slim volume of Yeats.

  Many of the best known television advertisements of the 1970s and 1980s were created by the British director Len Fulford. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, darkly humorous UK adverts starring the actor Rutger Hauer carried the theme 'Pure Genius'. Then came the 1994-95 Anticipation advert, in which the actor Joe McKinney danced to 'Guaglione' by Pérez Prado while his pint settled. The song was re-released and reached number one in Ireland and number two in the UK.

  The wait for a proper pint also drove the UK campaign 'Good things come to those who wait' in the later 1990s. From 1999 to 2006, a character named Michael Power anchored a major campaign to promote Guinness in Africa. The actor Cleveland Mitchell played him, portrayed as born in Jamaica and raised in Great Britain. By 2003 it was one of the best-known alcohol advertising campaigns in Africa. Jo Foster of the BBC called Power 'Africa's very own James Bond'.

  In 2002, Guinness applied the Michael Power formula to Asia with a character named Adam King. One of his tag lines read: 'Everyday someone, somewhere achieves something new.' In 2000, the 1999 advertisement Surfer was named the best television commercial of all time in a UK poll by The Sunday Times and Channel 4. It was produced by the agency Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO.

  Surfer drew on a 1980s television and cinema advert called Big Wave. It showed a surfer riding a wave while a bikini-clad sunbather takes photographs. Big Wave also inspired a well-known line in Christy Moore's 1985 song 'Delirium Tremens'. In 2001, Guinness won the Clio Award as Advertiser of the Year, citing the work of five separate agencies around the world.

  In 2003, the Guinness television campaign featuring Tom Crean won the gold Shark Award at the International Advertising Festival of Ireland. An Irish Christmas advert won a silver Shark in 2005. It first ran in December 2004 and has been shown every Christmas since. It shows snow falling across Ireland and ends at St. James's Gate with the line: 'Even at the home of the black stuff they dream of a white one.'

  The UK commercial 'noitulovE', first broadcast in October 2005, was one of the most-awarded commercials worldwide in 2006. That year Diageo replaced the Michael Power campaign with 'Guinness Greatness', which it says stresses the 'drop of greatness' in everyone. In 2007, the director Nicolai Fuglsig filmed 'Tipping Point' in Argentina. It centres on a large-scale domino chain reaction, and its £10 million budget made it the company's most expensive advertisement at that point.

  The 2000s also brought a series called Brilliant!, in which two crudely animated Guinness brewmasters discussed the beer. They reacted to each discovery with the catchphrase 'Brilliant!'. In 2009, the To Arthur advertisement showed two friends realising the company's long history and raising their glasses with the words 'to Arthur!'. The toast spread through the bar, into the streets and around the world. It gave rise to Arthur's Day, a series of celebrations of the life and legacy of Arthur Guinness.

  Anticipating the reopening of pubs after the COVID-19 pandemic, Guinness produced a 'Looks Like Guinness' advert in 2021. As of 2024, Guinness is the official beer of the Premier League.

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• 6. Variants and Misfires

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  Guinness stout comes in many strengths, and the Draught version sold in kegs runs at 4.1 to 4.3% alcohol by volume. In 1912, John Martin of Belgium commissioned Guinness Special Export Stout, at 8% alcohol by volume. It became the first Guinness variety to be pasteurised, in 1930. Guinness Bitter, an English-style bitter, sits at 4.4%.

  Guinness thought it had brewed its last porter in 1973. In the 1970s, after declining sales, the company decided to make Guinness Extra Stout more drinkable. The gravity was reduced, and the brand was relaunched in 1981. Pale malt was used for the first time, along with isomerised hop extract. Two new porters, West Indies Porter and Dublin Porter, followed in 2014.

  In October 2005, Guinness announced the Brewhouse Series, limited-edition draught stouts that would each be available for roughly six months. Brew 39 was sold in Dublin from late 2005 until early 2006. Many drinkers found it lighter, somewhat closer to Beamish stout than to standard Irish Guinness. Toucan Brew arrived in May 2006, named after the cartoon toucan and triple-hopped for a crisper taste.

  North Star was introduced in October 2006 and sold into late 2007. Three million pints of it were sold in the latter half of 2007. A fourth Brewhouse stout was announced for October that year, but no new beer appeared, and the series seems to have been quietly cancelled.

  From early 2006, Guinness marketed a 'surger' unit in Britain for use with cans at home. It was said to activate the gases in the beer by sending an ultrasonic pulse through the pint glass. In September 2021, Guinness Nitrosurge appeared in pint-sized cans with no widget. A special device on top of the can activates the nitrogen with ultrasonic frequencies as the beer is poured.

  Guinness Red, test-marketed in Britain in February 2007, used only lightly roasted barley to produce a lighter, slightly fruitier red ale at 4%. Guinness Mid-Strength, a 2.8% stout, was test-marketed in Limerick in March 2006 and in Dublin from May 2007. Breó, a wheat beer whose name means 'glow' in Irish, cost around IR£5 million to develop. It was later withdrawn, like Guinness Light, Gold, Pilsner, Shandy and several others.

  In March 2010, Guinness began test marketing Guinness Black Lager in Northern Ireland and Malaysia. By September 2010 it was no longer readily available in Malaysia. In 2014, Guinness Blonde was brewed in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, with Guinness yeast and American ingredients. When a new brewery opened in Baltimore, Maryland, in August 2018, the recipe became Baltimore Blonde, with Citra hops added for citrus flavour.

  Hop House 13, a lager released in 2015, was withdrawn from sale in the UK in May 2021 after poor sales. It remains on sale in Ireland. In 2020, Guinness announced a zero alcohol canned stout, Guinness 0.0. It was withdrawn almost immediately after launch because of contamination. It was relaunched in 2021, starting with pubs in mid July and with cans following in late August.

  Brewing leftovers found uses too. Guinness Yeast Extract was produced until the 1950s, and Heinz made a HP Guinness Sauce that was still available in 2013. One variant, Foreign Extra Stout, did not reach British drinkers until 1990, yet it had long been made for export.

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• 7. Markets Around the World

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  Guinness has been sold in Africa since 1827. About 40 per cent of worldwide Guinness volume is brewed and sold there, and Foreign Extra Stout is the most popular variant. Three of the five Guinness-owned breweries worldwide are in Africa. The stout is also brewed under licence in countries including Nigeria, the Bahamas, Canada, Cameroon, Kenya, Uganda, South Korea, Namibia and Indonesia.

  Foreign Extra Stout, at 7.5% alcohol by volume, is sold in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and the United States. Its basis is an unfermented but hopped wort extract shipped from Dublin, which is added to local ingredients and fermented locally. The strength varies from market to market. It is 5% in China, 6.5% in Jamaica and East Africa, 6.8% in Malaysia, 7.5% in the United States and 8% in Singapore.

  In Nigeria, a proportion of sorghum is used in Foreign Extra Stout. The beer is blended with a small amount of intentionally soured beer. Formerly that came from beer soured naturally in ancient oak tuns with a Brettanomyces population. Now it is pasteurised beer soured by bacteria. The drink was previously called West Indies Porter, then Extra Stout.

  Other African variants include Guinness Extra Smooth at 5.5%, sold in Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria. Malta Guinness is a non-alcoholic drink produced in Nigeria and exported to the UK, East Africa and Malaysia. Guinness Zero ABV is a non-alcoholic drink sold in Indonesia.

  As of 2004, Guinness ranked among the top three beer labels in Singapore and Malaysia. It held a 20 per cent market share across Southeast Asia. Malaysia was its third-largest market in the region and its sixth largest worldwide. Guinness began retailing in India in 2007. In 2017 it teamed up with AB InBev to distribute in mainland China, the single biggest alcohol market in the world.

  In 2006, sales of Guinness in Ireland and the United Kingdom declined 7 percent. Even so, the stout still accounted for more than a quarter of all beer sold in Ireland. By 2015 sales were rising in Ireland but flat globally. By 2023 Guinness was the most popular draught beer in the United Kingdom, with about 11% of all sales. It is the highest-selling beer in both Ireland and the United Kingdom.

  The United Kingdom is the only sovereign state that consumes more Guinness than Ireland. Nigeria is the third-largest Guinness drinking nation, followed by the United States. In 2023, a pub in Worcester claimed to offer the cheapest pint of Guinness in the UK, at £2.

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• 8. Mergers, Moves, Visitors

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  In 1986, Guinness acquired The Distillers Company. The takeover bid, engineered by the chairman Ernest Saunders, led to a scandal and a criminal trial over the artificial inflation of the Guinness share price. A £5.2 million success fee went to Tom Ward, an American lawyer and Guinness director. In the case Guinness plc v Saunders, the House of Lords declared that payment invalid.

  In the 1980s, as the IRA's bombing campaign spread to London and the rest of Britain, Guinness considered scrapping the harp as its logo. In 1997 the company merged with Grand Metropolitan to form Diageo plc, based in London. Guinness was maintained as a separate entity within Diageo. It kept the rights to the product and all associated trademarks.

  The Guinness brewery at Park Royal in London closed in 2005. Production of all Guinness sold in the UK and Ireland moved to St. James's Gate in Dublin. Then, on the 17th of June 2007, the Irish Sunday Independent reported that Diageo intended to close St. James's Gate and move to a greenfield site on the edge of the city. Diageo first dismissed this as a rumour. As speculation mounted, it confirmed a 'significant review of its operations', part of a drive to reduce the environmental impact of brewing there.

  On the 23rd of November 2007, the Evening Herald reported that Dublin City Council had put forward a motion to prevent planning permission ever being granted for development of the site. That would make it very difficult for Diageo to sell the land for residential development. On the 9th of May 2008, Diageo announced that St. James's Gate would stay open and be renovated. The breweries in Kilkenny and Dundalk would close by 2013, when a new, larger brewery opened near Dublin. The result would be a loss of roughly 250 jobs across Diageo and Guinness in Ireland.

  Two days later, the Sunday Independent reported that Diageo chiefs had met Tánaiste Mary Coughlan about moving operations from the UK to Ireland. The attraction was Ireland's 12.5 per cent corporation tax rate, against 28 per cent in the UK. Diageo released a statement to the London Stock Exchange denying the report.

  The Guinness Storehouse at St. James's Gate has welcomed over 20 million visitors since it opened in 2000. In 2019 it drew over 1.7 million, making it the most popular tourist attraction in Ireland. A self-guided tour explains the ingredients and the brewing. In the Tasting Rooms, visitors sample the smell of each ingredient under lighting in Guinness's gold and black branding.

  The Guinness Book of Records began as a Guinness marketing giveaway, based on an idea from the then Managing Director, Sir Hugh Beaver. Its holding company, Guinness World Records Ltd, belonged to Guinness plc and later Diageo until 2001. In 2025, a drama series called House of Guinness turned the growth of the business in 19th-century Ireland into television.

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