Guinness gracious
A reader of this blog might think that our trip to Ireland
had the two principal themes of celtic music and ancestral roots. We have not yet mentioned the third important
quest of our travels—the earnest search through all of Ireland for a pint of
stout that it is NOT a Guinness. Steve had noted prior to leaving home that the
anecdotal lore of the Americas holds that Ireland is a great place to find a
good beer. There is the general
consensus that a dark, warm pint of expertly pulled Guinness stout is the
pinnacle of this experience.
Steve quickly found out that the beer selection in any pub
anywhere in the country was quite limited.
There is a paucity of beerversity.
You can find one stout (Guinness), one red ale (Smithwick’s— pronounced
Smitticks), Heineken, and Carlsberg. I theorize that the reason everyone gets
so breathless about Guinness—its temperature, how it is pulled properly, how
long you let it settle, and the like—is because everyone likes to feel the joy
of being the connoisseur with only one beer to discuss endlessly.
In Kinvara Steve asked a barmaid why there was only one
stout on tap and that that stout was always Guinness. She answered that she would lose the right of
sale and delivery of Guinness to her bar if she carried any other stout on
tap. She said that there was a Cork
regional stout named Murphy’s—which we did find on the southern coast in
Kinsale. In an almost blasphemous
admission Steve prefers it to the big G.
In Carrigaholt many pubs still sported advertisements for a stout
called Beamish. When we inquired at the
Long Dock about ordering a Beamish instead of a Guinness the bartender reported
that Beamish was no longer in existence.
At a pub in Doolin a knowledgeable drinker said it still existed but was
never seen in the West. So we began to
get the idea that there was a Stout powerhouse in the country, one with saturation,
slick advertising, and a distribution monopoly.
Dusty competition
forgotten on the wall of a pub in Carrigaholt.
Dublin is the seat of Guinness’ kingdom. Noel is a big fan of Guinness and on occasion
takes to breathless descriptions of the stuff. (In all fairness Noel is a cosmopolitan beer
drinker with far-ranging and seeking taste buds in this area). We decided to tour the Guinness brewery mere
blocks away from our StayCity apartment.
Whenever we have traveled any distance small or large with
Noel and Amanda—by foot, by bus, or by car—there is always a portion of the
trip spent in dead standstill or circling around and around roundabouts as the
proper direction to proceed is discussed at length. This happened again of course, on our short walk
to the brewery. I guess they knew we
were prone to this difficulty as the Guinness people had nicely provided
ENORMOUS signs gathering all tourists into the weir of this well-oiled tour
machine.
“Noel which way do we
go, do you think?”
Storehouses at ground
level stretch for blocks.
Buses gather.
Unfortunate city
horses gather.
After
finding the entrance—YOU CAN”T MISS IT!—we went into the lowest level of the seven-story temple dedicated to the God of Stout. This is such a popular exhibit that you are
in a Disneyesque meander line of ropes for quite a while before plunking down
your eighteen euros. Windowless like a
casino, the ticket sales room once held the filled wooden beer barrels to be placed on a company train to go out to the Dublin quays for shipping around the world. The next
floor was the commercial gift shop of enormous proportions. The next level discussed the three ingredients of Guinness: hops, barley and water. The barley exhibit was like a child’s enormous sand
play box, only made of immense heaps of barley in a huge projector room that
showed vintage beermaking techniques and modern ones. They had hop vines
stretching to the ceiling in the next room, and then a vast blue lit waterfall
to showcase that important ingredient.
Water is a heady component of beer.
The
next four floors used equally hi-tech-produced displays for highlighting advertising
campaigns of the past and present; how
to make a wooden keg —cooperage— which is quaint now that there is no longer a
need, what with steel kegs now the norm; tutorials on
how to pull a pint; and an appointment-only beer tasting demonstration, as if some one needed that esoteric skill.
Old tech on display.
Effective advertising—as in hypnotic.
The
room that made me absolutely queasy was a huge cavern with about twenty
enormous screens all playing in-sync the extremely slick mini-movie commercial about how cool
beer drinking is in, for example, Botswana, or Sri Lanka. This was a company determined to win over the entire world. The pumped up music in the place began to unnerve me and I had to sit
down and have a meal, long overdue, before I passed out.
We could then continue to escalate up the other floors, with better and better views of the whole enormous campus.
Beer’s eye view of
the plant works as you go up and up.
There
are three opportunities on different floors of the building to have your own "free" Guinness pulled and consumed— free with the price of admission. We chose the circular Gravity Bar, on the top
story, for its views. Any other level chosen
would be like refusing to top the pyramid after two thirds of an arduous climb.
The windows scripted a bit of history of highlighted features seen in the distance.
The view.
Boys with beers in the bar.
The explanatory writings on one window pane pointed out Croke Park and its current use as as a
sports arena. What it didn't mention is this was also the site where the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1920 carried out the reprisal killings of thirteen spectators and the Captain of the Tipperary team of a Dublin/Tipperary gaelic football match in revenge for the execution of fifteen British intelligence officers carried out by Michael Collins and his operatives the day before. But why stir the foam of mostly tourists with that sad bit of old news? The event became known as Bloody Sunday locally and was considered so heinous as to unify the independence effort.
We
guiltily took a horse carriage back to the apartments. We did NOT go to a bar this night, but had a very
nice Brazilian meal instead and once again, in a nod to right living, went to bed at the decent hour of midnight.
Riders
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