Postscript: Michael Ash, 1927-2016

We received some sad new yesterday afternoon via Twitter. Michael Ash, the creative mathematician who pioneered nitrogen dispense systems, died on Saturday.

Sad to announce the death of my father Michael Ash on Saturday 30th April. Inventor of Guinness Draught. #puregenius pic.twitter.com/CwkgIPQsHO

— Lucy Ash (@lucyash_) May 3, 2016

I had the chance to meet Mr. Ash in Dublin on March 24, where he was being honored for his achievements. (It was the reason I was in Ireland.) I'll have more about his career in a future post, including some audio quotes I recorded in March. Here's a bit of the biography (edited for brevity) the brewery prepared for his visit.

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Michael read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge and was awarded a triple first in his studies – top scholar that year in Cambridge. Between 1948 – 1950, Michael was allowed to reduce his national service conscription by teaching Maths at a University (other than Oxbridge). He taught at Bedford College. Up to the end of World War Two, the Guinness Company had a policy of recruiting only first class honours science graduates from Oxford or Cambridge. Michael was the first non-brewer to be recruited into Guinness.

It was in this role, he led a team of over 20, and their primary role was to seek to improve the shelf life of bottled Guinness. However, Michael felt that the real prize was in developing a proper system for Draught Guinness and began dedicating his time to the ‘Draught Problem’.

The rise of lagers available on draught, especially in the UK in the 1940s and 1950s, was encroaching on traditional Guinness sales, and Michael felt that there was a great opportunity for Guinness, should the stout be available in Draught format. However, the essential problem was with the gas. Carbon dioxide was used to pressurise kegs of bitter and lager, and it was easy and effective for everyone concerned. Guinness, though was too lively to be draughted with carbon dioxide alone.

Of the 20 plus men on his Sample Room team, he could only afford to assign 2 people to work part-time with him on ‘Daft Guinness’ as it became known with the Park Royal Brewery. Michael talks about working weekends and late nights over a long period of time to eventually come up with a nitrogen gas solution. 

He worked hand in hand with Eric Lewis, of Alumasc, who supplied Michael with prototype after protoype of metal kegs with different experimental gas chambers.  The fact that nitrogen is an inert gas meant that they bubbles lasted longer and were smaller. The right amount of nitrogen, created the ‘surge’ and allowed for a controlled, creamy head that lasts for the whole pint.

The eventual solution was a ‘mixed gas dispense’ system. Known initially as ‘The Ash Can’, The Easy Serve Cask was a self-contained, two-part keg, with one chamber full of beer and the other full of mixed gas under pressure.

Having seen the possibilities, [the company] was in a hurry to get Draught Guinness out into the market place, and he demanded that it should be launched in 1959 – the year of the Guinness bicentenary.  At a board meeting of 9 December 1959 – Viscount Elveden (later 3rd Lord Iveagh)  reported that about half the draught Guinness outlets had now been changed to the Easy Serve system, and the changeover of the remainder should take place by mid-January 1960.

Irish Guinness vs. American Guinness

[Full disclosure. Diageo/Guinness paid for my trip to Dublin, including the flight and hotel. They bought me beers and food when I was out with brewery folks. Diageo Guinness are also a sponsor of this blog.]

Okay, this may be a bit gimmicky, but I wanted something on the internet to address this issue. My whole life I've heard, no matter where the Guinness is brewed, that Irish Guinness just tastes better than American Guinness. I decided to do a sensory test of this theory and while I was in Dublin last week, we put it to the test. For obvious reasons, we had to test can versus can. (If you believe a pint of freshly-pulled Guinness tastes better in the shadow of the brewery than at your local Irish-themed pub, well, of course it does.)

Here's Stephen Kilcullen, Global Director of Guinness Quality and one of the brewers at Guinness, walking us through the tasting. (I also sampled the two cans and agree with Stephen--but my palate is doubtlessly more crude than his and that counts for little.)




Sorry it cuts out there at the end--that was a videographer error. Stephen concludes by saying "I would absolutely, categorically struggle to tell them apart."

Michael Ash

When you walk into a pub, one of the beers might be "on nitro." It's usually a dark beer (though lately, not always). It has been used to most famous effect by Guinness, which celebrates the "surge" it produces when a pint is poured into a glass. Indeed it was invented at Guinness by a mathematician named Michael Ash back in 1959. Today, the folks at the brewery in Dublin honored him. I'll have more about this moment in brewing history later, but here's a shot of the inventor enjoying the fruits of his labor.

Is the Guinness Storehouse Experience Worth 20 Euros?

No. But it's a lot more impressive than I would have imagined.

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.

Under Gray Irish Skies

(Dublin, Tuesday 22 March 2016) No country has left a larger psychic imprint on the United States than Ireland. It's one of those few countries to which people clamor to establish a genetic link (and maybe not just white people), and therefore one to which nearly everyone does claim some connection, real or imagined. That cultural bridge makes us somewhat more aware of what's happening here, magnifying Ireland's influence on our imagination. And yet, even without involving our own vanity, it's hard to imagine such a little country having accomplished so much.

Dublin on the Liffey

It produced two of the 20th century's greatest writers (Joyce and Beckett), who stand in a crowded hall with other literary giants. It has not only an indigenous musical form, but some of the biggest pop stars of the past 50 years (and Van Morrison's musical legacy, like Joyce's literary one, is immense). Then there are druids, celtic knots, and a gorgeous, elvish language to add an otherworldly allure. Oh, and since this is a beer blog, I should at least nod in the direction of the hometown brewery here, which some people have heard of. (And they've got some pretty decent whiskey, too.)

All of which is to say that visiting Ireland's capital is therefore a disorienting experience. Because what we--or I, anyway--somewhat fail to appreciate is just how small this country is. The entire island is the size of South Carolina, and it has barely more people than Oregon. (If you include the population of all Irish people, which includes UK citizens, it's similar to Washington state. Dublin's population of 527,000/1.2 million compares quite closely to Portland's 619,000/1.8 m. Those of us who live in Portland have a hard time calling it a city, but it feels far more urban than Dublin, which is low-slung in the typical European fashion (few buildings top four stories). The lanes and roads are small and winding, and the buildings are old; it reminds me, in fact, of Portland, Maine's old town.

Being here reminds me that this is no center of European life. It feels like a place on the fringes, far enough out of the way to have stayed small and developed those wonderful quirks and idiosyncrasies that we all relate to. Later this week, I'm going to be spending time at the Guinness brewery (full disclosure: they paid for the trip), and one of the key pieces of context in understanding the brewery will be this remoteness--perhaps not just the brewery, but the brewery's place in the fabric of local life as well.

Today I'm off to immerse myself in the city as much as one can in a day's time. I hope to meet up for beers with a local informant tonight, so that will be enlightening as well. More to come--

Welcome the New Sponsor: Guinness Brewing

As you boot up your computer this morning (not that anyone really does that anymore), you'll notice a new banner add to the left of these words. Some time ago, I mentioned that I would be seeking sponsors for this site. You might have wondered what happened. Well, interesting story. I got a surprising number of inquiries (you know who you are--thanks!). One of them was the Guinness Brewery, which was totally shocking. Even more interesting, they wondered if I would consider them as sole sponsor--an arrangement I'd never considered. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how it turned out--though because one of the largest drinks company in the world was involved, getting that banner up took longer than I expected. We're doing an initial run of two months, so I thought maybe you'd be curious to know my thinking--plus one other information tidbit.

Why Guinness?
Guinness is, as everyone knows, one of the largest and most successful beer companies in the world. Nevertheless, not everyone loves them. They are also owned by Diageo, owner Guinness as well as Smirnoff, Crown Royal, Tanqueray, Johnnie Walker, and many others. I have had my own curious relationship with Dublin's giant: Guinness was the only brewery to flat out deny me a tour of their facility, and then I had an awkward call with Fergal Murray, then the face of brewing operations. And finally, many people consider their products bland and industrial.

When I decided to seek sponsors, I wanted companies that would be partners, folks to help me make a few bucks while getting my endorsement in the form of a banner ad. When I heard from Saraveza, General Distributors, and Double Mountain, I was delighted--they're exactly what I had in mind. It never occurred to me that a larger brewery would be interested. Blue Moon, Goose Island--even Bud of Coors might have inquired. I'm not really sure what I'd have done in that case.

But Guinness? A no-brainer for me. I have loved this beer (here in the US, we get a product called Extra Stout that has been a top-ten beer for me) for over 25 years. Many years back, the company ran a promotion to win a pub in Ireland, and friends and I wrote mini-essays with fantasies of moving to Ireland to pour pints of the stuff the rest of our lives. My favorite living author is the Irish author Roddy Doyle, who manages to situate a fair number of his most funny and/or poignant scenes into pubs where characters are gulping Guinness. (A Star Called Henry is one of the best books ever written.) This no doubt led to some inexcusable romanticizing of Ireland's most famous brewery, but then I would not be the first person to romanticize a brewery.

But even more than all that, this is Guinness. It's one of the most important extant breweries on earth. For long decades, it was the only multinational ale brand left, when the world had all gone to lager. It dominates both a national tradition and a nation more fully than any other brewery on earth. Guinness was one of the companies to invent branding. One of its employees, an economist, developed the student t test. Michael Ash, a mathematician, developed the nitrogen draft system. And even if it had done none of that, just surviving since 1759 earns a certain amount of respect.

All of which is to say that I am quite pleased to have that banner on the site. Please welcome them aboard.

To Ireland
While I was discussing this sponsorship idea with Guinness, something interesting happened. The brewery had reconnected with Michael Ash, the man who developed the nitrogen draft system in 1959. Amazingly, he is still well and living in England at 88. The brewery decided to have an event honoring him, which will happen next Thursday at the brewery. Guinness has invited me to come along and interview Ash when he arrives, and they've also promised to give me a tour of the brewery. I believe they're inviting an English writer as well.

Guinness are arranging this on their dime, which is the only way it would be possible for me to attend. I hope and plan to get a trove of material to write about, and I expect, with this double arrangement with the brewery, that you might wonder how objective I will remain as I report it all out. And, while I don't have a formal connection to the brewery beyond what I've described, I wonder about this, too. I worry more about the soft influence such largess contributes. (When I wrote The Beer Bible and Cider Made Simple, I paid for all my travel.)

This is a new experience for me, and a bit of a trial run. I will continue to report back how it's going. I hope you watch what I write carefully to see if it passes your smell test. It is certainly not the most ideal circumstance--I would so much rather be living in an era when I was a staff writer at a magazine with a travel budget. Fortunately, Guinness isn't a brewery I write about much in the first place; so except for my dispatches from the brewery in coming weeks, it shouldn't affect things around here much at all. But we'll all be watching.

I'm off on Sunday to Dublin, so expect Irish blogging next week.

New, But Not Innovative

I received an email yesterday so brazen and cynical in its scope that it left me briefly stunned.  It begins:

Just in time for the holiday season, Guinness introduces the perfect option for beer connoisseurs and enthusiasts alike with Guinness The 1759, a limited edition ultra-premium amber ale. [Their bold.]

Source: CNBC

In this one sentence are two fascinating details: 1) the name of Diageo's latest is "Guinness The 1759," which I think must be bizarre even in Irish-English, and 2) Diageo announces a category heretofore unknown to beer drinkers, "ultra-premium amber ale."  Surely this must augur even more fascinating details?  It does!  Carrying on:

This latest innovation from Guinness brings artistry and elegance to the beer category by combining  the famous Guinness yeast with both traditional beer malt and peated whisky malt – the very same used in the world’s most deluxe Scotch and Irish Whiskies - for smooth and quality tasting beer.

You know something deeply suspicious is afoot when the fifth-largest drinks company claims to be "innovating," and suspicions mount when the reader discovers that peated malt seems to be the sole innovation.  Let's hold our horses, though--something more must be on the way, right?  Glad you asked:

This unique beer is the first from Guinness that uses a cage and cork mechanism to seal the bottle (typically used with champagne) and packaged in a stylish back velvet lined gift box.  Only 90,000 bottles will be produced, which makes this commemorative release the chance to be part of Guinness’ brewing history.

Wonderful!  In addition to the extremely rare use of whisky malt*, this "unique" ale will be packaged in the same manner as Champagne!  And sold in a gift box!  And will be sold in small quantities for no other reason than to justify an obscene sticker price!  (Thirty five bones.  And so you know that this beer will retain its exclusive, just-for-the-one-percent cachet, Guinness brand manager Doug Campbell promises that "We will brew it one time only and basically throw away the recipe afterward."  Which is quite a statement, given that Diageo also claims the beer is based on a 200-year-old recipe.  Once they're done with this beer, they're throwing out all the old log books!)  But wait, can there be even more?  Yes:

This is the first offering of the new Guinness Signature Series™ which offers a range of limited edition luxury beers. This series gives beer drinkers more options for different occasions, from fine dining to exquisite gifting.   

"Which is to say this isn't rare or special at all, just the first in a series of scams we plan to run on what we imagine are endlessly gullible rubes willing to fork over $35 for an amber ale."  (That last bit is, despite being in quotes, only what I imagine went through the email-writer's head as he put the finishing touches on things.)

This is probably the most shameless email I've ever received, and the beer is definitely in the chutzpah sweepstakes as well.  But this debacle isn't actually Diageo's fault.  It's the poison fruit of wildly over-priced craft beer--resulting from a combination of fan lust and brewer manipulation.  A company like Diageo, with a brand as valuable and important as Guinness, would be stupid not to play the same game.  It represents a moment of decadence inevitable with anything so heavily hyped.

It's a shame, too.  Some beer really is expensive to make and necessarily limited in quantity--Rodenbach, Cantillon, and Cascade (among many other fine and reputable American craft beers).  But you have to know something about beer to appreciate that, and in the not knowing, there is room for the unscrupulous to make quickie beers, pop them into a glitzy package, and jack the price up 500%. 
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*Not rare.

Guinness is Irish, and So is America

Source

Two points connected tenuously by a holiday.  The first comes from a post at The Economist (hat tip with more at the recently-enlivened Beeronomics), wherein the title says it all: "Why Guinness is Less Irish Than You Think."  The writer can only muster a couple points to justify this Monday fodder (a blogger knows filler when he sees it): 1) Arthur Guinness was, 250 years ago, pro-British and 2) the giant corporation has many connections to London.  The first one is especially lame, existing merely to give the thin post at least two points.  The second one isn't much better, and the lead-in sentence is a good example why: "The beer the company has become most famous for—porter stout—was based on a London ale, a favourite of the street porters of Covent Garden and Billingsgate markets."

In terms of beer history, that's roughly like saying American-style ales don't exist because they were based on English bitters.  It's true that Dublin's breweries embraced porter (along with every other brewing country in the 19th century--porter was the first international style).  But they changed it.  London porter was made with brown malt, a rough, smoky old product that pre-dated Daniel Wheeler's method of roasting malt black.  In London, they continued making porter the same way, but Dublin dumped the brown and substituted it with black malt, splitting the line.  Then, in the late 1920s or early 1930s, Guinness began using unmalted roasted barley in its grist, bringing the recipe to its modern standard.  One of the reasons Guinness hopped the Irish Sea was to conquer England, which it did, eradicating porters and stouts from the island, at least for a time.  The Economist gets causality backward here.  (I don't care if you love or hate Guinness, but it is the most well-known brewer of a style that is uniquely Irish.)

Now, to segue awkwardly into the related topic: the strange spectacle that is the United States turning Irish for one day.  Our good friend The Beer Nut regularly points out that whatever this cultural affectation that we have in the US is, it's not Irish.  Fair point.  I have an Irish-born friend who told me she was mystified when she arrived in America and met people who said they were Irish.  She asked where they were from and they would say something like "Chicago."  It would have been someone with a grandparent from Belfast.

I understand that from a European perspective this seems bizarre, and until I visited Europe, I was in total agreement.  Now I think its the Americans who have things right.

History is not a tangible thing.  It's the story we tell to explain ourselves.  It's why Orwell's 1984 is so profound--the entire narrative hangs on his famous sentence, "He who controls the past controls the future."  It's a lot easier to control that past when there are remnants of it sitting in your home town.  If you happen to have, say, extant Roman or Celtic artifacts in your town, it gives form to the stories.  I grew up in one of the most recently-settled parts of the US (by Europeans, anyway), and we used to treasure our hundred-year old water pumps and wagon wheels.  You work with what you have.

But part of America's history is our European heritage.  If your family has lived in Dublin for ten generations, you get to call yourself Irish.  If your family lived for ten generations in Dublin and then moved to New York, do you lose that history?  The Irishness that Americans celebrate is different than Irish Irishness, but it's no less real or authentic.  Our ancestors arrived on this continent ten or a hundred or 500 years ago (and that includes most Native Americans, who at this point have histories as fragmented as my own), but that's not when their history began. 

So I say put on your green shirt, go hoist a pint of Guinness (or better yet, a Porterhouse Plain, if you can find it), and offer a sláinte or three.

The beer the company has become most famous for—porter stout—was based on a London ale, a favourite of the street porters of Covent Garden and Billingsgate markets. - See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/03/economist-explains-13?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ee/whyguinnessislessirishthanyouthink#sthash.rbljngLV.dpuf

The beer the company has become most famous for—porter stout—was based on a London ale, a favourite of the street porters of Covent Garden and Billingsgate markets. - See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/03/economist-explains-13?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ee/whyguinnessislessirishthanyouthink#sthash.rbljngLV.dpuf

The beer the company has become most famous for—porter stout—was based on a London ale, a favourite of the street porters of Covent Garden and Billingsgate markets. - See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/03/economist-explains-13?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ee/whyguinnessislessirishthanyouthink#sthash.rbljngLV.dpuf

Some Tweaking Required (All Your Irish News in One Place)

What a strange thing that Americans follow the news from Ireland so closely.  It's got the population of Tennessee and is the size of Maine, but never mind: we love it.  Last week, news came out about a nascent Diageo-created holiday dubbed "Arthur's Day" for the founder of Guinness.  The four-year-old PR campaign seems to have had fairly benign origins:

At 17:59 p.m. today, drinkers will raise a toast to the 18th century brewer, who invented the iconic stout in Dublin. Diageo Plc (DGE), which owns the brand, says Arthur’s Day is a celebration that supports Irish bars struggling after the worst recession in the nation’s modern history.... 

Diageo came up with Arthur’s Day four years ago to celebrate the beer’s 250th birthday. It has since morphed into a nationwide festival every September. The London-based company is staging 500 concerts as part of the event, with bands including Manic Street Preachers and the Script turning up at bars.

If any brewery has the juice to start a new holiday, I say more power to them.  Problem is, the shindig may be too successful. 

Yet this year, the campaign against Arthur’s Day is gaining momentum. In 2012, emergency ambulance calls in Dublin rose by 30 percent from the prior week amid the revelry, the Irish Times newspaper reported.  Emergency consultant Stephen Cusack in Cork described the streets of the city on Arthur’s Day last year as being akin to the “last days of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Whoops.   Part of the problem is that Guinness reportedly hands out free pints at that fateful hour, and it leads to a country-wide kegger, replete with late-night booting in the bushes.  This has led to something of a PR backlash, which sort of defeats the point.  Mayhaps Guinness needs to make a few changes for the 2014 celebration.

Brewbot
Now, since we're talking of news on the distant island, let me draw your attention to the Brewbot homebrewing system, developed by tech nerds in Belfast.  It is a fully-automated homebrew system that you operate from your cell phone.  I am not promoting this so much as regarding it with my jaw on the ground.  What some people won't do for a pint of beer, eh?

Nike Fails to Do a Google Search; Makes Guinness Shoes

Well, this is embarrassing--the home town shoe company seems to have committed an international gaffe:

The athletic apparel behemoth is releasing a new version of its SB Dunk Low, a popular casual shoe. It is black and tan-colored. And since we're getting close to Saint Paddy's Day, the shoe has a nickname that is apparently beer-inspired - the Black and Tan.

Brian Boyd [of the Irish Times]: "It has certain historical associations. The Black and Tans were a ruthless auxiliary force of the British army before we became independent in the 1920s. They were responsible for wide-scale massacres, butchering of people. You would not - we don't even - for example, in the U.S. you may go into a bar and asked for a drink called a Black and Tan."

The whole thing is wonderful and strange. First off, the idea of doing a beer-inspired athletic shoe is psychedelic. I have to think that the local beer culture seeped into the Nike campus and infected the minds of the shoe designers there. But that's not all: Nike has a version of the shoe with a tie-in to Guinness. It is, predictably, black, brown, and head-colored (what, beige?). The ultimate in cross-marketing, pulling in beer drinkers, sporty types, and holiday celebrants. Throw in March Madness and you've got the superfecta. I'm not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed. (Actually, I think they're pretty righteous sneaks. "Righteous sneaks"--is that what the kids still call them?)

By the way, while I would fault Nike for being boneheaded enough to let this shoe go out without having done a Google search to find out if "black and tan" meant what they thought it meant, I am going to exonerate them on the following point, voiced by that Irish Times reporter:

It's how the Americans view Saint Patrick's Day and view Irish culture and history. And it's the very fact that some people are saying that these are beer-themed sneakers, that the only way to celebrate a national holiday of a country with a very rich culture and a very rich history and literature, et cetera, is to pour massive amounts of alcohol down your body.

Look, Americans are culpable for an almost infinite number of sins of ignorance against other countries. We regularly insult vast swathes of the globe and should be held to account. But we get to celebrate St. Patrick's Day however we wish. St. Patrick's Day is now, as celebrated in America, fully American. Every culture gets mangled when it comes into the American melting pot, but that is our culture--a hodgepodge of reinterpreted traditions from around the world. So no dice on the you're-doing-it-wrong argument.

Stout Politics: Obama, Guinness, and the Queen

I have always felt that beer, particularly when applied in the convivial setting of a cozy pub, is the tonic to bring people together. Or, in some cases, countries:

President Barack Obama opened his four-nation, six-day tour through Europe with a stop in Ireland on Monday. There, he downed a pint of Guinness, traversed to the tiny town of Moneygall to meet distant relatives, and spoke to an estimated cheering crowd of 25,000 in Dublin. Obama praised the "centuries-old relationship" between Ireland and America, and said his visit was meant “to reaffirm those bonds of affection."

Obama continues his run as the most good-beer-friendly president since George Washington. He drinks beer at the ballgame. He touts hometown beer (Chicago's Goose Island, now helmed by Oregonian Brett Porter). And when in Ireland, he drains a pint of plain. Obviously, I would have preferred he go with Beamish or--radical idea--one of the upstart craft breweries. (Don't get the Beer Nut started.) But hey, politics is politics:

Even for those who don’t have their fingers on the nuclear button, alcohol, particularly beer, sucks away formality and promotes trust, in part because demonstrates a willingness to be vulnerable among one’s company. For a president, merely sipping a pint collapses the arrogance and pretensions of his high office; the man’s not quite so perfect — he’s approachable.

And indeed, when Queen Elizabeth visited Ireland last week, she wouldn't deign to stain her lips with the plebians' pleasure. (Don't get me started.)



As for Guinness--or rather parent company Diageo--a picture is worth a quite lot more than a thousand words.

Marketing experts estimate that the photograph of President Obama downing a pint of plain in Ollie Hayes’s bar is worth over $200 million to Guinness. Some marketeers have even suggested Guinness could cancel its advertising spend for the rest of the year on the back of Obama’s decision to drink his pint of the black stuff.

I wonder--surely the picture of the Queen turning her back on the pint glass is worth a Euro or two amongst the radical anti-monarchists across the commonwealth? It certainly makes me feel a bit of fondness.

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PHOTOS: GETTY. RETRIEVED HERE AND HERE.

Timing is Everything

I just received a book in the mail: The Search for God and Guinness: a Biography of the Beer that Changed the World by Stephen Mansfield. From the cover:

"Beyond the company's financial success, Guinness has also been a remarkable and inspiring force for social good, whose impact was felt from the company's earliest days down to the present...

Mansfield tells the story of brewery founder Arthur Guinness and traces the family tree to his heirs who built housing for the poor, restored some of the great institutions of faith in Ireland, and who even insured that soldiers had pints of brew on the battlefields of the world's great wars....

In an age of corporate irresponsibility and corruption, the Guinness story is a challenge to our times and an inspiration to our hearts."

If you don't understand why I find this hysterically funny, have a look at this exchange. Whoo-boy: I hope they sent a copy to the Beer Nut.

A Quarter-Millennium and Still Brewing

Tonight at a minute to six Ireland time (17:59), Guinness will raise a toast to celebrate 250 years of brewing and selling beer. It was on near* this day in 1759 that Arthur Guinness took out his famous 9,000-year lease on the St. James Gate brewery in Dublin. I will acknowledge this date in stout-loving Beervana with a post or two on the milestone, beginning with a consideration of that quarter-millennium Guinness has managed to stay in business.

We are used to looking backward, and in retrospect, vast numbers do not impress us. Thanks to museums and history books, we have grown comfortable with the distant past, and by this measure, 1759 barely rates. Interestingly, when we look into the future, even modest numbers seem impossibly distant. Global warming gets a yawn because, hey, 2100 is so far in the future, who cares whether the seas are lapping at the shores of Beaverton? So imagine the year 2234. That's when BridgePort will celebrate its 250th. A better perspective on longevity, yes?

With that in mind, let's cast our gaze backward with a little more interest. Envision a cosmic mash tun that can take us back to 1759. What would the world look like?

According to the UN, the world's population was just 800 million people, and most of them lived on farms. This was a pre-industrial, pre-electrical era, so people managed the nights with candles and lamps. It was still a mostly organic world. The steam engine wouldn't be invented for another ten years, so bodies did all the work: men lifted and toted; oxes and horses pulled and conveyed. Ships moved by windpower (it was after the glory days of piracy, but boats were still powered by sails). This pre-industrial phase also coincided with the peak of the Little Ice Age, so I expect it was a mite chilly in old Dublin town.

It was an interesting time historically and intellectually. The upheaval of the reformation led to the rise of empire and during Guinness' time, Europe was enjoying the fruit of the enlightenment. As empires rose and grew, revolutions percolated. (It was the year Voltaire published Candide.) America's was 15 years away France's 30. But for all that, it was only relatively enlightened. Colonists were busy importing slaves to the US--where, we sometimes forget, they were common even in the North. There wasn't a single democracy and the idea of rule by the people was inconceivable. Instead, empires with now-strange names were common: Prussia, Qing (Manchu), Ottoman, Persia, and Mughal.

North America was still mostly unexplored, and although decimation of native nations had begun on the East Coast, in the Midwest and West, Native Americans continued their undisturbed ways of life.

The founding of Guinness also came during that age of the rise of private capital and the idea of the modern business. Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a work that would be instructive in forming the ideas he published later in Wealth of Nations. Breweries were timeless, and there remain extant examples that pre-date Guinness. But Guinness was, by Protz's account, a businessman from the start, not an old-world craftsman. He was sharp enough to sign the famous 9,000-year lease, also securing free water and also bought a neighboring flour mill to ensure a regular supply of grain. When the rise of porter's popularity started flooding in from England 30 years later, Guinness started brewing it in Dublin and by 1799 made it his sole product.

Guinness prospered, and the company's early bio reads like a modern corporation: he battled local government over taxes and eventually gained enough influence to become sole supplier to Dublin Castle. He became the first national brewer in Ireland, using barges to distribute his ale. And the brewery continued to innovate, creating a "double porter" by the end of the century and finally, under Arthur's son (also Arthur) created the "dry" style that came to typify Irish stouts. The company's marketing and business success in subsequent decades--centuries--is legend.

So there you have it, 250 years. Quite a thing, and certainly makes it a lovely day for a Guinness.

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*Text corrected. See long, interesting debate in comments below.

Guinness Anniversary Stout, Reviewed

The year is 1759, the number of democracies in the world, zero. The poet Robert Burns is born. America is yet 17 years of turmoil from birth. The world is near the peak of the Little Ice Age, which means the vast, fir-covered reaches of what will become Oregon are probably well-blanketed in deep drifts of snow, all the way to the coast. Frederick the Great rules the powerful Kingdom of Prussia.

And young Arthur Guinness has just taken out a 9,000-year lease on a dilapidated brewery (try to get one of those in Portland) at St. James Gate.

Two-hundred and fifty years is a long time, in other words. Most modern countries didn't exist then; for a company to have survived this length is absolutely remarkable. Sure, the company has been sold to a corporate empire (Diageo), but still. They're making beer now 250 years on. And so, to celebrate this grand event, Guinness decided to release an anniversary beer. It is on shelves now.


Tasting Notes
Let me admit from the outset that I expected something special. You must come out of the gates strong and offer your adoring public a pint as legendary as your reputation. It is the opportunity to remind people just how astonishing the milestone is, and just what an important part of history your beer has been. You must wow people. You just must.

Guinness didn't.

Guinness 250 Anniversary Stout ("250" henceforth) is a variation on at theme. It's slightly more alcoholic (fiver percent versus 4.2), slightly fuller of body, and slightly "fizzier." From the brewer's mouth:

Designed primarily for the U.S. market's celebration of the Guinness anniversary, Fergal Murray says "I've made a beer that works well through the summer months. It's a one-shot pour, you don't have to do the six steps (though there are still Guinness Stout rituals involved in the perfect pour)." The brew is carbonated, rather than nitrogenated for a more bubbly, "beer-like" effect rather than the traditional soapy head that builds on a stout, and involves two malts in its production. "You get a little different flavor palate, a bit aromatic, perhaps sweeter taste," says Murray, who is clearly excited about the day and life in general. "It still has all the fundamentals of a good stout--the extra barley, the extra hops, but it's a little different on the flavor profile."

My impressions do not deviate much from Fergal's. The pour is disorienting--the head gushes out like one of my homebrews and if you're not careful, you end up with half a glass of what appears to be dish detergent. As it settles, you get a Guinness-y aroma: the characteristic sour/burnt note, the roast. It smells like a Guinness.

If the fizzy head was disorienting, the fizzy palate, carbonated rather than nitrogenated, is as well. The taste isn't a huge departure from regular draft Guinness. It's got a slightly more chalky quality, but then at the end turns quite metalic. Unpleasantly. It's think and tinny. The more I went back for a swallow, the more it resisted me. Perhaps it's not a beer that you want to introduce to a warm room for any length of time.

I'm not actually a huge fan of draft Guinness. It's too thin to support what would otherwise be a rich spectrum of flavors. The Extra Stout is perpetually on my short list of world's best, but it's a very dense, thick beer. The head is brown and the body silky from the heft of all that malt. I was really hoping to see something along these lines, not a product designed, if the masterbrewer is any guide, to appeal to the summer palates of American drinkers. Call it a gentleman's C- on the patented ratings scale. A great shame.

I leave you with one of the more amusing reviews I found of the beer, from a British blogger (salty language ahead):

How to describe it? A bit more flavour than standard draught Guinness. But that's no great challenge. Vaguely milky aroma. A little bit of generic maltiness, too. No roast to speak of. What's the point of it?A slightly different, but equally toothless, Stout. No fucking clue. Diageo have no fucking clue.

Guinness Anyone?

Guinness is celebrating an anniversary this year--the 250th since Arthur signed the lease at St. James Gate. It's not a bad year to have something to promote, and Guinnie's going all out, including the rumored release of a new beer. Yet not everyone is pleased. Some chafe under the fame of what they describe as an inferior beer. Those in the know will, head tilted forward didactically, argue for Beamish.

I am a snob, and I do find the draft product thin and uninteresting. The pedants are right--Beamish is better. But hey, it's a force of nature, and perhaps the most widely-available beer on earth. So what do you think, Does Guinnie live up to the hype? Let's hear what the verdict in Beervana is.

Guinness, Brettanomyces, and Me

The St. James Gate Brewery in Dublin produces a beer called Guinness--you might have heard of it. Actually, it produces a whole bunch of beers, and they're all called Guinness. They vary from the light-bodied draft beer you get in pubs to a strong Nigerian version that employs sorghum rather than barley. My favorite--and one of the best beers in the world--is the strong version you can find in bottles with the name "extra stout." What makes it delightful are not the virtues of density and creaminess (though virtues they are), but a characteristic sour tang.

Jackson attributes this to funk resident in the crevices of the 100-year-old wooden tanks at St. James Gate in which only the strong stuff ages. Diageo, the parent conglomerate, denies this, but something's causing it. Rumor (and Jackson) credit a certain strain of yeast known as Brettanomyces. In the brewing world, Brett cultures have notorious reputation and are mainly regarded as contaminants. So profound is Brettanomyces (the cool kids call it "Brett") that brewers regard porous equipment (plastic, rubber, cork, wood) as permanently defiled and useable only in beers where Brett character is tolerated. On the other hand, Orval, the extraordinary lambics, Belgian browns and reds and others include it in their world-reknowned recipes. So you can't throw the Brett out with the bathwater.

I have decided to test the theory. I am in the midst of brewing up a batch of Irish stout, a fairly standard recipe that employs roasted barley, as appropriate to style. But after an initial fermentation with a standard ale yeast (I eschewed an Irish strain, rogue that I am), I'm going to dump in a Brett culture to finish it off. Brettanomyces are apparently voracious eaters and can gobble down sugars regular Saccharomyces (ale yeast) can't digest. Brettanomyces--the goats of the yeast world. My intention is to give the beer a wee taste of the sour without overwhelming it. We shall see.

In any case, I will report back as the experiment evolves. I don't know that I can prove what lives in the vats at St. James Gate, but you never know. I may also prove what doesn't live there. Stay tuned.