It’s not often a beer brand represents a nation. Yet Guinness, the iconic dark Irish stout (or porter, but we’ll get on to that) with a creamy head, has definitely and definitively become Ireland’s national drink. As one of the world’s great beer brands, it is a global beacon of Irishness and constant source of national pride.
The brewery that still makes it in Dublin, known as St James’s Gate, was even voted the World’s Leading Tourist Attraction in 2023 by World Travel Awards. It beat the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal, for goodness sake. Yes, THAT’S how famous and culturally important the brand is!
But any story about Guinness must start with the man who it’s named after.
Arthur Guinness was born in the small town of Celbridge, County Kildare, about 23km west of Dublin, Ireland. Despite much speculation and guesswork, no one knows his exact date or year of birth, but it was almost certainly in 1724 (or very possibly January 1725).
He was the eldest son of Richard Guinness and Elizabeth Read, originally from Celbridge and Oughterard (about 9km away) respectively. They probably met through Richard’s dealings with her father William Read, a tenant farmer, who’s said to have once also sold home-brew from the roadside to Jacobite soldiers abandoning Dublin to make a last stand at the Siege of Limerick in 1690. Tentative beer connection, anyone?
Richard had a good and respected job for the era, factotum to the Reverend Dr Arthur Price, vicar of Celbridge and later Church of Ireland Archbishop of Cashel. From medieval Latin, factotum literally translates as ‘do everything’, so essentially he was a ‘jack of all trades’ for the clergyman from around 1722. His main role would have been steward, the person in charge of running Oakley Park, Price’s country house, managing the household, properties and lands – probably what you’d call an estate manager today.
With Price constantly travelling between his many parishes, he relied heavily on Richard Guinness to take care of all his affairs at home.
Arthur Guinness, the first of four sons and two daughters, was born two years after Richard started working for Arthur Price (and certainly named in honour of his father’s boss). The family grew up in a house on Main Street in Celbridge next to a malthouse (originally owned by James Carberry, a local brewer). There is not much documentation about those early years, but we know Elizabeth died on 28th August 1742, aged 44 years old, when young Arthur was 18.
10 years later, two significant events happened. The first was that Archbishop Price himself died on 17th July 1752 and was buried 6km away in Leixlip. For their loyalty and service, he bequeathed £100 to both Richard and Arthur Guinness, now 28, who were described as “servants” in his will. It’s the equivalent of about £27,000 today. The second big event was that Richard remarried, to a widow called Elizabeth Clare, the proprietress of the White Hart Inn in Celbridge (now a Spar supermarket). It’s presumably while helping to run the pub for the next three years, including doing all the brewing, that Arthur learnt to love the art of beer-making.
With £100 burning a hole in his pocket, topped up with a good amount of savings, Arthur decided to get a proper job in 1755. He took on the lease of a local brewery in Leixlip with his brother Richard. In the shadow of Leixlip Castle, and at the confluence of the River Liffey and its tributary the River Rye, it was perfectly situated – and proved something of an instant success. By September the same year, Arthur was recognised as “of Leixlip, Co Kildare, brewer” in local records, brewing good ale for the local townsfolk.
After honing his craft for the next four years, Arthur got ever more ambitious and looked to expand his brewing operations. He headed to Dublin and famously signed the now iconic 9,000 year lease at an annual rent of £45 for the run-down former brewery at St James’s Gate on New Year’s Eve, 31st December, 1759. He bought the four-acre site from the Rainsford family, which consisted of a dilapidated mill, two malthouses, stabling for twelve horses, a 200-ton hayloft and access to water from the Main Line of the Grand Canal from the harbour at James’s Street.
(Back in 1670, an alderman and brewer named Giles Mee had been given a lease to the water rights at the site of the brewery (The Pipes), which were taken over by his son-in-law Sir Mark Rainsford, later Lord Mayor of Dublin. In 1715, Mark Rainsford II leased the premises to a Paul Espinasse, who hailed from a family of French Huguenot brewers, who made ale there until 1750. Then the brewery went dark for 10 years until Mark Rainsford III transferred the lease to Arthur Guinness.)
The deal Arthur struck was an incredibly unusual one. The 9,000 year lease was unheard of in an era more used to leases running for the single lifetime of a leaseholder or up to “three lives” (literally for the lives of the signatory, their partner and their heir).
So by 1760, Arthur was crafting beer in Dublin, in the now globally renowned St James’s Gate brewery – but it wasn’t the famous dark porter he was making. In those early days, Arthur was sticking to his tried and trusted ale, brewing for local pubs and only making his first export of six and a half barrels to Great Britain on 19th May 1769.
But despite the brewery being up and running, Arthur wasn’t making beer in any great quantity. Even up until 1774, his ale production was only about 400 barrels a year – a tiny amount by today’s standards. It’s possibly because the Dublin beer market at the time was fiercely competitive, with 35 documented brewers in the immediate city alone. (And to add insult to injury, about 28 of these were using the same water as Arthur Guinness, crammed into the St James’s area.) Another theory was that he had the luxury of building his business slowly because he had a few different income streams, so wasn’t totally reliant on his Dublin brews. He was still making money from his Leixlip brewery of course, but he also had a profitable side hustle in flour milling. For much of his career he acted as a third-party miller for grain merchants selling to Dublin, eventually becoming a principal partner in the Hibernia flour mill built in Kilmainham, a southern suburb of Dublin, in about 1800 (the profits from which were said to have been about a third of those from the brewery!).
It also can’t have hurt his cash flow that he received a £1,000 dowry (about £273,000 today) when he married 18-year-old Olivia Whitmore in 1761 in St. Mary's Church, Dublin. The beloved daughter of William Whitmore, a grocer from Essex Street, Temple Bar, and Mary Grattan from Drummin House, Carbury, County Kildare, Olivia and Arthur went on to have a staggering 21 children, of which only 10 survived until adulthood.
It is thought that Arthur Guinness first started brewing his now famous dark porter in around 1778 (although every historian seems to claim a different date), eighteen years after he acquired the brewery. So, what prompted him to expand his brewing repertoire to include a dark beer?
Well, there’s no doubting porter was bang on trend in the 1770s. Everyone was drinking it. Originally it was an English beer but it had steadily been making a name for itself in the Irish capital thanks to its cheaper price, higher ABV and darker colour.
Porter had been invented in London half a century before, in the early 1700s. It was a brown beer made from brown malt (so named because it was kilned brown over a fire) and heavily hopped so it could be kept for longer in barrels. It was often quite strong and was said to have had a burnt or smoky flavour, which the alchemy of aging in oak smoothed out over time. This new beer type was a huge success, cheap, tasty and full of calories. No surprise then that it was instantly adopted by London’s porters, a whole underclass of society that carried, pushed and dragged the capital’s goods from ships and markets, transporting everything from parcels to produce. It was an energy-sapping job, but they were the lifeblood of the city, strong men who streamed along the streets and connected everything. And they drank porter beer by the barrel-load – so pretty soon it was informally, then formally, named after them.
The earliest written reference to the name porter has been found in a London political pamphlet by a Whig journalist called Nicholas Amhurst. Dated 22nd May 1721, his article attacks the Stuarts (supporters of the Jacobites) by claiming the Whigs (supporters of George I) would rather be poor than in chains: “think even poverty much preferable to bondage; had rather dine at a cook's shop upon beef, cabbage, and Porter, than tug at an oar, or rot in a dark stinking dungeon.” For reference, a ‘cook’s shop’ was the lowliest of all the London eateries, reserved for the poorest inhabitants (like the porters).
A few years later, in 1726, Swiss traveller César-François de Saussure, writes a wonderfully evocative letter about London life: “One drinks nothing in this country except beer. There are several qualities. Small beer is the one everyone uses to quench their thirst; it only costs one penny per pot and is even found on the best tables. Another type is known under the name of ‘porter‘, that is to say, ‘carrier’, because porters or goods-carriers, and all the little people, drink it a lot; it is a thick and strong beer, which has the same effect as wine, when a certain quantity is drunk; it costs three pence the pot.”
Porters were proving incredibly popular in Dublin too. Of course, Guinness wasn’t the first porter to be made in the city. Prominent Irish newspaper The Dublin Journal, published by George Faulkner, mentioned Irish-made porter as early as 1740. An article on 10th June stated that “It is universally allowed that the Porter or Beer, brewed in this Town, greatly excels that, in every Respect, which is imported from London”.
But those first Dublin porters would not have looked or tasted much like the velvety black-ruby red Guinness of today. (Porter didn’t become truly black until 1818, when the ‘black patent malt’ was invented). In 1785, around the time Arthur Guinness was first dipping his toe in the market, about 65,000 oak barrels of the dark stuff were imported from England. (For context, there were only about 130,000 people living in Dublin at the time!). So London brewers definitely had the upper hand, said to control about 80% of the Dublin porter market in the 1770-80s.
Arthur had a tough job on his hands to out-brew the established London porters in taste and price. In those early years, he took advice from (and later employed) members of the Purser family, experienced English brewers originally from Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, who’d moved to Dublin from London, to craft a better-quality beer.
It must have worked because by around 1796, while the French Revolution was in full swing in France, Arthur stopped brewing ale altogether, focusing entirely on the porter named after himself.
It was an exciting decade or so for brewers. In 1790, an English chemist called William Nicholson invented the hydrometer, which measured the density of a beer (basically the rate at which the yeast converted the sugar into alcohol). It showed Arthur that pale malts produce more sugar per pound than darker malts – so he didn’t need to rely on using so much inefficient and inferior brown malt. And later, on 28th February 1818, a British engineer called Daniel Wheeler patented a game-changing new drum device for kilning and roasting malt. It caused a revolution in the industry, allowing Arthur and his maltsters to easily adjust the temperature and length of drying – so at last he could control the colour of the finished malt. It meant he could make his porter truly black, like it is today. It is thought his malt supplier was the Plunkett Brothers, a family business owned by John Randal Plunkett which had their roasting house literally outside St James’s Gate.
At the start, Arthur was making at least four types of porter – town, country, superior and regular – with ‘keeping porter’ added a few years later. As the names suggest, ‘town’ was sold in and around Dublin, the mildest version. ‘Country’ was slightly stronger and more hopped, the strength helping preserve it for distribution across Ireland. ‘Superior’ was higher quality, including some cask-aged stock for a more complex flavour profile (and evolved to become what we know Guinness to be today). ‘Regular’ was the most common and is likely to have had an ABV of around 6.6%.
‘Keeping porter’, first made in 1801, later came to be known as West Indies Porter. It was specifically created to withstand long sea voyages to distant international markets, like the Caribbean. The recipe had a higher hop content, which acted as a natural preservative, allowing the beer to remain fresh for the epic journey across the Atlantic Ocean.
The first known advertisement, printed in a Dublin newspaper, was in 1824. The first recorded shipment to Africa arrived in Sierra Leone in 1827. It evolved over the years, eventually being rebranded as Guinness Foreign Extra Stout in 1849 – which remains the most popular variant of Guinness in Asia and Africa to this day.
There’s a lovely story that verifies the international nature of Guinness, the first written mention of it being enjoyed in Europe, direct from the front line of the Napoleonic Wars.
An Irish Captain from the 7th Regiment of Hussars called William Verner was wounded in the Battle of Waterloo on 18th June 1815. After being sent to Brussels for treatment, he recovered enough to write home with a glowing report about his favourite restorative tipple:
“I was nearly a month in bed, reduced almost to a skeleton, and when I attempted to get up, unable to stand. By degrees my strength returned but was not fully restored for many months. A curious circumstance occurred, which I have often thought of since. When I was sufficiently recovered to be permitted to take some nourishment, I felt the most extraordinary desire for a glass of Guiness’s [sic] porter, which I knew could be obtained without difficulty. Upon expressing my wish to the doctor, he told me I might take half a tumbler or a small glass, but no more, as if I exceeded it it might prove very injurious. It was not long before I sent for the porter, and I shall never forget how much I enjoyed it. I thought I had never tasted anything so delightful. It was only for a very short time I was satisfied with prescribed quantities; the dose soon became increased, and I am confident that it contributed more than anything else to the renewal of my strength.”
(Read the amazing full story on Zythophile)
Sadly, Arthur Guinness did not live to see the stratospheric worldwide success of his porter beer. He died of natural causes on 23rd January 1803, aged (around) 78 years old, leaving his brewing empire to three of his sons, Arthur II, Benjamin and William. He was buried beside his mother, back in the village of Oughterard, and an obituary in The Dublin Evening Post read: “The worthy and the good will regret him because his life has been useful and benevolent and virtuous."
His life had certainly been useful and benevolent. He was so much more than just a brewer – he was a visionary entrepreneur and philanthropic employer, looking after all his staff in a generous and progressive way. He was also an incredibly respected and successful businessman. In 1800, the brewery had sold around 10,026 barrels of beer. By his death in 1803, that number had doubled, on its way to becoming the largest brewery in Ireland 30 years later (by 1886 it was the largest brewery in the world).
His sons continued to follow in their father’s footsteps, expanding the reach and reputation of the brand in innovative ways. By 1816, the Guinness brewery records even boasted that their porter “successfully rivalled the London product even in the English metropolis”.
Over the next few decades, Guinness was becoming somewhat of a household name, appearing in Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers (published in April 1836) and was even praised by the UK’s Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in a letter to his sister on 21st November 1837: “There was a division on the Address in Queen Victoria’s first Parliament, 509 to 20. I then left the House at ten o’clock, none of us having dined… I supped at the Carlton, with a large party, off oysters and Guinness, and got to bed at half-past twelve o’clock. Thus ended the most remarkable day hitherto of my life.”
Controversially, Guinness stopped being a porter in the 1840s, when labels first started identifying it as a stout. Historically, stouts were stronger versions of porters but Guinness, which was originally known as an Extra Stout Porter, eventually dropped the ‘porter’ part whilst maintaining a lower alcohol content compared to traditional stouts.
Today, Guinness is licence brewed in over 50 locations (with countries including Cameroon, South Korea and Canada) and enjoyed in around 150, becoming one of Ireland’s most culturally important and enduring brands along the way. The harp logo, which first featured on a Guinness label in 1862, has even become a symbol of national identity (hey, it’s on the front of all Irish passports!). 10 million glasses of Guinness are enjoyed a day (a pint is poured every seven seconds in the US), which equates to 1.8 billion a year!
“It’s a lovely day for a Guinness” said the famous advertising campaign from the 1930s featuring the toucan. Seems like Guinness will be continuing to have some lovely days well into the future.
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