Guinness: The 250 Year Quest for the Perfect Pint

Introduction: What Is Guinness Stout?

A pint of Guinness is a magic thing—black magic. It is the rich color of dark chocolate, with an equally rich and creamy head unlike any other beer. A pint of Guinness is a magic thing that rewards the palate as no other beer on earth.

Technically, Guinness is a stout porter, a dark, top fermented beer that is strikingly distinctive both in taste and appearance. Culturally, Guinness Stout is an enduring icon that has been deeply intertwined with Irish life and folklore—both at home and abroad—for a quarter of a millennium. Guinness is a beer apart from mortal beers, but it is even more than that.

What is Guinness Stout, and where does one go to answer that evocative question? To the source, of course.

For generations, the Guinness brewery at St. James’s Gate was Dublin’s largest employer. Everyone knew someone who worked there, and nearly everyone was related to someone who worked there. The address has no number, for none is needed. Everyone in Dublin knows St. James’s Gate, and every Dublin cab driver I’ve met has a story to tell about St. James’s Gate and the beer they make there.

I was still listening to my cab driver’s story about his brother and his brother’s friend, and his brother’s friend’s friend, and their perfect pint as we drove through what has been the main gate of the brewery since before George III ruled Ireland and George Washington presided over that upstart democracy across the water.

The actual St. James’s Gate, for which the brewery is named, was the old medieval city gate through which people once passed on their way to the south and west of Ireland, or as they began religious pilgrimages to holy sites in continental Europe. It stood for at least five centuries immediately perpendicular to the location of the present brewery gate. Everywhere I look, I find myself staring at history and history staring back.

I’m here to meet Guinness Master Brewer Fergal Murray, not in a steel and glass corporate headquarters, but in the house where Arthur Guinness took up residence in 1759 and where his children and grandchildren were raised. Arthur Guinness brewed his first batch of beer within a stone’s throw of where I’m standing.

Arthur was brewing at this place for 30 years before the French Revolution, and nearly two decades before the American Declaration of Independence. His was the epoch of Mozart and of Handel, of Jonathan Swift and of Samuel Johnson, of Voltaire and of Benj amin Franklin. This was an age, it has been said, that bequeathed to posterity many things of lasting importance.

One such thing is the black liquidation with the froth on the top called Guinness.

Having inherited greatness from that truly great era, this singular beer has been brewed fresh every day for generations by men such as Fergal Murray. He started at Guinness in 1983 with an applied sciences degree from Trinity College in Dublin, as well as an MBA, and a master brewer degree from the Institute of Brewing in London.

When I mention his scientific credentials, he shakes his head and tells me: "My heart lies in being able to talk to people about the qualities of the brand. I’m certainly more passionate about that than sitting back and thinking about the science of it."

When the man who makes the stuff uses the word passionate in describing his product, I know that I’m off to a good start. When he goes on to toss around phrases like the perfect pint, it makes me think that I’m home in my local pub talking with friends who are ardent Guinness fans. In fact, I’m discovering that the man who makes the stuff is himself an ardent Guinness fan.

The perfect pint.

Is that not, after all, what Guinness is all about?

The pint is point of contact between all Guinness fans and Guinness, and the mythic perfect pint is the often spoken Holy Grail of those who drink this beer.

How better to introduce the subject of the black liquidation with the froth on the top than with the ritual of the pouring of the pint, the slow and thoughtful two-shot pour?

No other beer has to go through a ritual, Murray smiles. We make the ritual important. It’s theater. The ceremony behind pouring a pint is essential to the consumer’s requirement for a perfect pint of Guinness. It’s all part of the indefinable essence. The ritual and the crafting of the pint is about serving the beverage to your customer in the right way. With any other beer, you can just put it under the tap and hand it out. But with Guinness you’ve got to think about it.

It is reckoned that more than four million pints are poured every day around the world, but each pouring is like a sacred ceremony. As any publican will tell you, pouring a pint is not something to be rushed. Three or four pints of other beer can be poured in the time that it takes to slowly and carefully pour a pint of Guinness.

We do the two-part pour to build the strength of the head, Murray says, slipping back into his scientific training as he introduces the ritual. First, you place a clean, dry, branded pint glass under the faucet at a 45-degree angle, never allowing the faucet to touch the glass or the beer. You aim the font at the harp [the Guinness logo] on the pint glass, and pull the handle slowly toward you. Allow the beer to flow smoothly down the side of the glass until it’s about three-quarters full, tilting it slightly to straighten it. You stop the pour when the beer is about an inch and a half from the top, then you set the glass on the bar to allow the beer to settle.

All good things require a wait, our mothers have told us, paraphrasing our age-old cultural adage. The more theatrical among us would call this a dramatic pause. The settling is the intermezzo in the process where the thirsty drinker is given the opportunity to enjoy the pint visually before he or she is allowed to touch or taste it.

As if by magic, a reverse waterfall of tiny bubbles the color of roasted barley malt surge up though the blackness from the base of the pint.

As if by magic. A pint of Guinness is a magic thing, and part of the magic is the visual show that we are required to pause and enjoy before we are permitted to treat our sense of taste to other forms of magic.

You give the consumer a vision of the surge, Murray says proudly. People like to see this activity, which is unique in the beer world.

What is this phenomenon that he calls the surge and others call the waterfall effect?

As with any good ritual, there is a story. As with all the Guinness stories, we’ll be getting to that in due time, but suffice to say the key word is nitrogenation. In my first conversation with Fergal Murray, he told me that I could do a whole chapter on nitrogenation, and I have. Most Guinness fans know that there is nitrogen in their pint, but few know the story behind it. A long time ago, in the late 1950s, a man named Michael Ash—a scientist, like Fergal Murray, with a passion—figured out that adding these little two-atom molecules would be part of the key to perfection in the head of a pint of Guinness.

Because the surface tension of the beer is so strong, the nitrogen doesn’t escape, the passionate scientist Murray tells me. The bubbles float to the top, surrounded by the surface tension of the beer. That’s why they don’t dissipate as fast as carbon dioxide bubbles that occur naturally in all beer. The carbon dioxide bubbles dissipate because there is less surface tension to hold them in place. The nitrogen bubbles don’t dissipate. The nitrogen can’t escape because the protein-carbohydrate mix that holds the beer together is so strong. The quality of the raw materials in Guinness is directly associated with the sustainability of the perfect head. The strength of the head is one of the fundamentals of a good pint of Guinness. That’s why we do a two-shot pour, to create a foundation for a wonderful head.

Pointing to the tiny surging bubbles, he explains that during the settling you allow the consumer to see the wonderful surge, the activity of the nitrogen bubbles trying to get back into solution after they’ve been energized. They can’t get back into solution because of the surface tension of the beer, so they surge to the top, down the outside, and back up the middle.

It is an art, but an art that can be mastered. When the surge is complete, and the beer considered settled, the publican tops off the pint with a domed head that has the texture of rich whipped cream, unlike nearly any other beer.

For presentation purposes, it’s always best for a pint to be completely settled, the master brewer says, doubling as master of this ceremony. If you taste it before that, there shouldn’t be any difference in the taste. It just looks better.

He explains that the surge and settle time is affected by the gas mixture and by the temperature of the beer. Ideally, the beer should be between 4 and 6 degrees centigrade (38 to 44 degrees Fahrenheit). The specifications for the temperature and the mix of gas are created to provide a perfect head, which measures 18 millimeters from the base of the head to the lip of the glass, and 22 millimeters from the base to the top of the head.

Adjusting the gas mixture is a lot like tuning a musical instrument. The only criterion is the end product. In the U.S. market, Guinness is poured with a mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide that is specified at 70 percent nitrogen, plus or minus 5 percent. In Ireland, it is about 80 percent, although, as Fergal Murray points out, this is individually tweaked at the pubs. He adds that in Ireland there are individual temperatures and individual gas specs for each line running from keg to tap.

During the settling, the beer is building a nice, consistent strength of head, he says proudly eying his work of art. The pint is art both in the work of the brewer and the work the publican, whom he compares to another profession. It’s like an architect, when the final vision of his building is to put a dome on the top. He has to have a very strong foundation to support the dome. You’re allowing the strength of the foundation to occur by settling. You can’t do a dome if you fill the glass with a one-shot pour. You might get a nice-looking head, or you might not, but you won’t get a dome.

Then the passionate man turns to that word perfect again: To pour a perfect pint, you build that strength, you allow it to settle, and then you top off the beer, allowing this wonderful, creamy head to form. You don’t want it rushing into the glass, it’s always a slower speed top-off. The final step is to serve the perfect-looking pint.

What is Guinness Stout?

Is this is it?

Yes and no.

There is more to Guinness than the ritual pour that is the point of contact between us and our beer. There is even more to this beer than the nitrogenated form we know in pubs. To half the Guinness-drinking world, nitrogenization does not exist. Nor did nitrogenization exist for two centuries before the epiphany of Michael Ash.

Out of the 250 years of Guinness history, there have emerged the three principal product variants that we know today. The oldest of these is Guinness Foreign Extra Stout, which traces its origin to West Indies Porter, first brewed here behind these walls in 1801. Next is Guinness Extra Stout, whose direct precursor was Guinness Extra Superior Porter—for which the founder’s son penned a recipe in 1821. Finally, there is Guinness Draught, which dates back half a century to 1959, the year that Michael Ash and the Guinness scientists figured out their foolproof way to create the perfect head on that perfect pint.

The three variations on the stout that comprise the heart of the Guinness portfolio contain essentially the same ingredients, although Foreign Extra Stout is higher in alcohol. This is because its ancestor originated with a requirement for a beer with higher alcohol to withstand the rigors of being exported over great distances in conditions such as existed in sailing ships in the nineteenth century. It contains about 7.5 percent alcohol by volume, although that varies slightly depending on which market in which it is found. The other two variants have 4.2 percent alcohol by volume.

Foreign Extra Stout is found throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and the Far East, but rarely elsewhere. Guinness Draught is found in Ireland, the United Kingdom, North America, Australia, Europe, and Japan, but rarely in the same markets as Foreign Extra Stout. Extra Stout is sold in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and North America.

Before 1959, it may not have happened in exactly the same way, but great pubs and great bartenders have always been creating great rituals and great ceremonies, the master brewer continues as he contemplates the carefully crafted pint of Guinness Draught and reflects on its two dozen decades of family heritage. There has always been an art to drafting beer. Getting beer out of a cask and into a glass with the right consistency, the right temperature, and the right look, was an art, it is why people went to a specific pub. Being a draught publican was a real trade.

Turning to a bottle of Extra Stout—for it is available only in bottles, as was the custom with nearly all Guinness for many years. He explains that "there is a ritual to pouring from a bottle of Guinness Extra Stout, but a different ritual. In Ireland, a publican will not pour a bottle of Extra Stout into a glass for you. He’ll give you the bottle and the glass. It may be a pint glass, a half pint or a tankard. Then you get the excitement of continuously topping it off yourself, of continuously creating a new head every time. You get the excitement of the explosion of the carbonation, and the lovely brown head. The bartender will never replace the glass. The bartender will just drop you the bottle. He knows that it’s your glass, and that you’re creating your own ritual. He’ll just give you a new bottle and there you are. This was a ritual in its own respect before Guinness Draught, and it’s something that we’re proud of."

Far from Ireland’s shore, Foreign Extra Stout has also come to enjoy an identity of its own. I’ve talked to Nigerians who think of Guinness as their national beer, said Murray, who worked as a Guinness brewer in that West African country for more than three years. They wonder why Guinness is sold in Ireland. You can talk to Nigerians in Lagos who will tell you as many stories about their perfect pint as an Irishman will. They’ll tell about how they’ve had a perfect bottle of Foreign Extra Stout at a particular bar on their way home from work.

Yet, Guinness, in its various forms, is enjoyed in nearly every nation on earth because of the Irish, the people from that tiny green island in the North Atlantic. That, as they say, is part of both the history and the folklore of Guinness.

The brand has been fundamentally associated with Ireland since 1759, the master brewer tells me. As Irish people have traveled around the world, they want to hold onto that piece of Ireland, they want to hold onto something tangible. Guinness is a great connection with home. When an Irishman travels, he’ll always sniff out an Irish bar somewhere. We know that we can be among our own and watch a rugby match.

Indeed, it is the craic, the Irish term for good times, that causes everyone else to seek out a good Irish pub.

We’re very proud that people will always gravitate to an Irish pub because of the fun aspect, Murray smiles. "I was in Australia recently and had a fascinating night on my own in Melbourne. There was a medical conference going on in the hotel where I was staying, and the people were gathering in the lobby to go out for a social night and they were asking for the nearest Irish bar. That defines what it means. They were stuck at a convention in Melbourne and they wanted to go somewhere for a bit of fun. Their view was that to find that fun, they had to find an Irish bar. That sums it up. That’s why this feeling transcends boundaries. When they turn up at the Irish bar, the Guinness is the celebrated choice with which to enjoy the evening."

Whether in Dublin, or in a pub called The Dubliner in Melbourne or Mombasa, the essence of Guinness is that which we seek, and this is what leads us through their doors—or through that big black gate at the place called St. James’s Gate.

It’s a bit of craft, and it’s a bit of theater. It’s a ritual, Murray says of the Irish pub, and of the pouring of the pint. If you get the bartenders doing this in a passionate way, they’ll enjoy themselves commercially and they’ll be proud of what they do. Consumers will recognize this and they’ll enjoy their pint even more as well. Once it’s done correctly, it delivers an extraordinary experience to the customer. You get what is probably the most attractive beer product in the world. We say you drink Guinness with your eyes first. And the bonus is in the complexity and balance of the flavor.

Today, millions of people visit Ireland to enjoy the rolling green hills and the craic. Of them, nearly a million visitors come to St. James’s Gate each year to touch a piece of Guinness history and to enjoy a pint of the most attractive beer product in the world—at the source, of course.

Will their pint be the elusive perfect pint?

As Fergal Murray has assured us, the perfect pint is dependant on the hand of the publican and the perfect pour. Beyond that, it is the perfect ambiance, the crafting of the perfect pub. This is one part the job of the publican—and one part that intangible something within us that reacts to the craic to produce that perfect smile, just as the nitrogen reacts within the Guinness to produce the perfect visual manifestation within the black liquidation with the froth on the top.

As the mysterious and enigmatic author B. Traven masterfully relates in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and as countless others convey in countless tales of quests for buried treasure and Holy Grails, the quest is as much about the quest itself as it is about the pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. It is the search that inflames the mind and fires the spirit. In large measure, the perfect pint is made perfect by the adventures and the myriad of pints along the road that have led us to the mythic perfect pub.

That’s why people look for that Holy Grail of the perfect pint, Murray muses. "They come to Ireland looking for the best pint. People are always looking for that. Even I’m looking for that perfect pint. That’s why Guinness is such a legend."

The perfect pint is, after all, a state of mind that you and I and countless others have created within ourselves as we have walked that long and winding road. You and I walk this road alone, just as we walk it in the company and the footsteps of others.

Long ago, before all of us, and before there were all of those pubs and pints and footsteps, there was a single set of footsteps on that road to the perfect pint. They were those of one Arthur Guinness, and therein begins our tale.

1

Origins

Brewing has been part of civilization since antiquity. Professor Solomon Katz at the University of Pennsylvania has found Sumerian recipes for beer that date back four millennia, and beer is mentioned often in ancient Egyptian literature. As H. F. Lutz points out in Vitaculture and Brewing in the Ancient Orient, published in 1922, Middle Kingdom texts from Beni Hasan enumerate quite a number of different beers. Among these a garnished beer and a dark beer. As David Ryder points out in the Newsletter of the American Society of Brewing Chemists, Egyptian beer was also used as a medicine, a tonic for building strength . . . a universal cure for coughs and colds, shortness of breath, problems of the stomach and lungs, and a guard against indigestion.

It has been suggested that the brewing of beer is at least as old as the baking of bread, and certainly both have been practiced since the dawn of recorded history. Indeed, the art and science of the brewer and those of the baker are quite similar, both involving grain, water, and yeast. In fact, the Sumerians baked barley loaves called bappir that could be stored in the dry climate and either eaten as bread of mixed with malted barley to form a mash for brewing.

Beer, by definition, is a beverage originating with grain, in which the flavor of the grain is balanced through the addition of other flavorings. Since the Middle Ages, those other flavorings have principally been hops. Today, a brewer typically starts the process with cereal grains—usually, but not exclusively, barley. The grains are malted, meaning that they are germinated and quickly dried. The extent to which malted grain is then roasted imparts a specific color to the beer, a step in the process that is obviously important to making Guinness what it is. The