A little background. Guinness is, as you may have heard, a brewery in Dublin. The brewery tour is one of the (the?) most popular in Ireland, except that you don't get to see the brewery. Instead, you wander through the Guinness museum, learning a bit about how beer is made along the way, but mostly you're getting an immersive experience in Guinnessiana. Interestingly, despite the fact that it's geared entirely toward beery novices, there is quite a bit of interest for those with a historical bent.
As you wend your way up seven stories, you come across an old roasting drum, the largest Steel's masher I've ever seen, a repurposed 19th century kettle and ancient wooden conditioning tun (the kind you've seen in photos), and a somewhat surreal museum of old 2D ads rendered in three dimensions. (And a lot of Guinness's ads were surreal to begin with.)
If you're in Dublin, you're almost certainly going to spend the twenty euros to see this. You do get a free pint at the circular, glass-walled Gravity Bar on the seventh floor at the end of the tour, which you can sip while gazing out at the town. But even if you figure 15 euros, that's pretty steep. The good news is you won't mind it too much once you're finally up on the top floor drinking that pint.
Pics below.
Click to enlarge.
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| The Steel's masher. It's a device that blends water and dry grist as it enters the mash tun. |
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| Bars and restaurants are scattered throughout. |
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| The Gravity Bar. |
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| The brewery beneath the Gravity Bar. |
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| The gift shop's scale is suitably giant. |
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| Breweries and churches, cheek to jowl. |
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| This plaque is placed, of course, on a wall down the slope of Waitling Street. |
20 Euro? Wow. We went on the tour back in 1989, before the Gravity Bar, before the huge gift shop, and it was less than a quarter of that. There was a tour as well as a multimedia presentation and then a stop at the tasting room for free pints, which no one seemed to be counting. Something like six pints later and we were done.
ReplyDeleteIt's cheaper if you book in advance online.
ReplyDeleteWhat really bugs me about that heritage plaque that mentions the Guinness waiting room is that it's affixed to a building which, at the time of Ulysses, was part of the Phoenix Brewery. Where's the Phoenix's plaque? Damn you for not mentioning it, Joyce!