Knees up ... the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin is designed to resemble the inside of a pint glass.Credit: AFP
In 1759, an Irish brewer named Arthur Guinness took out a 9000-year lease on a 22-hectare property at St James's Gate, near the centre of Dublin. The company hefounded here celebrated its 250th anniversary in September, with a heavily marketed international event called Arthur's Day. If you missed it, there is always St Patrick's Day on March 17, a national religious holiday that has somehow become an annual, global drinking session, thanks in part to the Irish diaspora and the universal appeal of our most famous and mysterious export: the black beer that's supposed to be Ireland's lifeblood.
As many as 7000 people are expected to pass through the Guinness Storehouse this coming Paddy's Day. A former yeasting facility converted expensively into a modern visitor centre at the turn of the 21st century, it has become Ireland's top tourist attraction, drawing more than 1 million visitors annually. The storehouse is a site of pilgrimage for those who love the drink and is of cultural interest even to those who can't stand the stuff (it is no less distinctive or divisive than Vegemite). For expatriates such as me, it makes for a branded homecoming, as if Guinness had sponsored my return.
I sometimes ask myself whether I really do love this particular stout, or whether I'm driven by custom or habit or a Celtic-nostalgic notion it contains the essence of the motherland. Today's tour of the storehouse reminds me this last idea is a product of canny advertising. Among the exhibits is a model of the Brian Boru harp that Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness - Arthur's grandson and later lord mayor of Dublin - appropriated for the company logo, forever associating his brand with the ancient king who established Ireland as a "land of saints and scholars". In 1921, when the country won back its independence from British rule, the government of the new republic was obliged to print the harp in reverse on the new flag, so as not to violate the Guinness trademark.
This building is well-stocked with such facts, although the emphasis is now on interactive displays that explain the history and chemistry of the drink. The brand manager, Lisa Fitzsimons, told me before I began the tour that the storehouse is meant to be an "experience" not a "museum". The interior is designed to resemble the inside of a pint glass, ascending in a swirl of easily digestible information from the old brewery floor to the Gravity Bar at the top, which has a 360-degree view over the city.
On the way up, we learn the bitterness of Guinness comes from hops and the blackness from roasted barley.
Hold a pint of it up to the light, we are told, and its true colour becomes apparent - Guinness is actually "a dark ruby", which doesn't quite diminish the yin-yang mystique of its final appearance. The white head is created by a so-called "surge effect" of falling nitrogen and rising carbon dioxide, which apparently came about by accident when local publicans began serving draft Guinness through foot pumps rather than drawing it straight from a tap in the barrel.
Drinkers decided they preferred it this way, presumably because of the creamier texture but also, perhaps, for the holy and voluptuous ritual of watching the storm settle in the glass, and taking aesthetic pleasure while you wait forgratification, which might well appeal to a nation with an increasing number of lapsed Catholics. Guinness has since made a selling point of this, if not an outright fetish, and now claims it takes precisely 119.5 seconds to serve the perfect pint.
The storehouse contains a practice bar where visitors can be trained by professionals in the art and craft of what they call "the pour". I feel I am at an advantage here, having pulled gallons of it as a barman at Irish pubs around the world, including Kitty O'Sheas in Paddington, Sydney, where I worked a demented 20-hour shift one St Patrick's Day, taking short, clandestine breaks to nap for a few minutes.
As it turns out, there is a sound precedent for this. According to the detailed wall displays, the original brewing room at St James's Gate used to have a "tapping area", where workers could fill their tankards throughout the day.
After lunch in the new Brewery Bar (poached salmon in a Guinness cream sauce, followed by a Guinness and chocolate mousse), the storehouse archivist, Eibhlin Roche, tells me the company was always good to its staff. The biggest employer in Dublin at the height of the Industrial Revolution, it paid the best wages and provided health care to all personnel and their families. "That included everything from maternity nurses to funeral arrangements," Roche says. "'From womb to tomb', as they used to say."
Records are now being made available to the descendants of those workers, so that third- or fourth-generation Irish visitors can trace their ancestry back through the brewery gates.
Roche's professional interest is in the anthropology of Guinness - the role it has assumed in the life of this city and country. "Obviously, it's more than a drink," she says. "To a lot of people, Guinness has become a part of whatever they think it means to be Irish."
I suppose this includes me. From where I'm standing, looking through the clear glass walls of the Gravity Bar, I can see St Patrick's Cathedral, which Benjamin Guinness paid handsomely to renovate, and beyond that St Stephen's Green, the once-private park his son and successor, Arthur, donated to the people of Dublin.
Somewhere to the south is the house where I grew up and the pub across the road where I had my first taste of Guinness. I was six or seven and my friends and I jammed sticks into the pressure valves on metal kegs outside Delaney's. This causes jets of stout to spray high in the air, and we tried to drink the resulting black rain.
We didn't yet like the flavour but we pretended to, if only because our fathers looked so content with their pints whenever we watched them through the windows of the pub. Sipping one or two of my own this afternoon, I imagine that contentment as the "essence" of Guinness, the core of the formula that remains a trade secret.
In reality, this is just another industrial process, poeticised by 2½ centuries of salesmen, the sharpest of whom once told us: "Guinness is good for you." For legal and medical reasons, the company is no longer allowed to make that claim but many continue to believe it. More than 8000 years from now, when Arthur's original lease on the brewery is due for renewal, I hope my descendants are still fools for this stuff.
FAST FACTS
Getting there
Etihad flies to Dublin for about $1550, low-season return, including tax, from Sydney and Melbourne via Abu Dhabi (14hr 20min and 8hr 35min).
The Guinness Storehouse is at St James's Gate, Dublin. Open daily 9.30am-5pm (until 7pm in July and August). Entry costs €15 ($9.80) adults, €34 families. See guinness-storehouse .com. Buses run to the brewery from Aston Quay, Dame Street and O'Connell Street.
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