No beer has the fierce loyalty or charmed legacy that follows the Guinness Stout. This blessed dark brown porter is the quintessential stout for good reason. It’s strong distinctive taste has been the pride of Ireland for nearly three hundred years because its hearty bite is rich with history not often associated with libations.
In the village of Celbridge lived Arthur Guinness. He was the employee of Arthur Price. The two were dear friends and when Price died, he left Guinness and his son 100 pounds. Now, although that sounds like a painfully small sum, that 100 pounds was the seed from which one of the world’s most renowned beers grew.
When Guinness firs set up shop in Dublin 1759, he found a dilapidated brewery that he wished to lease. It was the St. James’s Gate Brewery. Guinness agreed to a lease of 45 pounds per year for 9,000 years! Before long he decided to focus all of his energy on one beer, the dark stout.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the Guinness brewery was the largest in the world. Think that’s unimpressive? Have you ever heard of the Guinness Book of World Records? Yeah, this family had a hand in that too. Leave it to the creators of the one of the world’s greatest beers to start collating statistics on everything.
Today, Guinness Limited has breweries in 51 countries. Approximately 10 million pints of Guinness are drunk every day. So, the next time you take a sip of a frothing Guinness Stout, consider this: the flavor you are tasting was created before the United States of America existed. It is not only an exceptional beer, it’s a piece of history.
