Guinness: 250 Not Out

Arthur Guinness, 250 years on, is still tripping the dark fantastic. The Irish brewery may be part of Diageo, a global drinks giant where Irish stout sits uncomfortably with whisky, cognac and vodka but nevertheless Guinness should be an inspiration to both beer lovers and craft brewers. It proves, beyond peradventure, that beer does not have to be pale, fizzy and boring. In short, black is beautiful.

Guinness has a lot to celebrate. 1759 was the year Arthur Guinness (right) signed a lease worth 250 on a dilapidated brewery in St James's Gate, Dublin, with an annual rent of 45. It was a risky undertaking. There were 30 other breweries in the area, with many more spread across the Irish capital, and around 200 in the whole country.

Arthur clearly had a great belief in his ability to survive as the lease was for 9,000 years. But the odds were stacked against him. The British placed a heavy tax burden on Irish beer in order to give free rein to imports from London, Bristol and Edinburgh.

Many of the Dublin brewers went out of business but Arthur survived and flourished by taking on and beating the Brits at their own game - namely, the production of porter and stout.

He was just 34 when he arrived in Dublin. His father, Richard, had brewed ale for the local bishop in Celbridge, Co Kildare. The grateful prelate left Richard's son 100 in his will, which Arthur invested in a small brewery in Leixlip. By 1759 he was in Dublin and brewing ale.

In 1799 Arthur took the fateful decision to stop all ale production and concentrate on porter and stout. Porter and its strong version, stout porter, were developed in London early in the 18th century and were originally a blend of pale, brown and "stale" [well-matured] ales. After a slow start, porter and stout came to dominate beer production due to massive demand from the burgeoning industrial working class.

By the time Arthur Guinness arrived in Dublin, so much porter and stout from London and Bristol was pouring into Ireland that the local brewers were threatened with ruin unless they changed their methods. Arthur grasped the opportunity and hired a London porter brewer to train him in the skills of making the style.

Guinness porter and stout were a sensation. Before the arrival of the railway, Arthur used Ireland's canal system to move his beers around the island. Aware that British brewers were busily exporting to all parts of the empire, he developed a stronger version of his beer for the Caribbean trade. It was launched in 1801 and was called West Indies Porter. It was this beer that turned Guinness into a global phenomenon.

Arthur's son Benjamin took on the export trade and renamed the beer Foreign Export Stout Porter. Over time, the title was shortened to Foreign Export Stout and today FES is the basis for the various forms of Guinness brewed around the world.

Arthur assiduously built good relations with the British. He became the official brewer to Dublin Castle, the seat of colonial power. Arthur spawned an amazing 21 children and one of his sons, also called Arthur, was appointed Governor of the Bank of Ireland. The Guinness family became pillars of the establishment and played a leading role in the social, cultural and literary life of Ireland. One branch of the family even accepted peerages from the British and became the Earls of Iveagh, acquiring a large estate in Thetford in Norfolk.

Arthur died in 1803. His success can be measured by the fact that he left a fortune of 23,000, made after a comparatively brief brewing career. Arthur II and Benjamin took over the brewery, with Benjamin developing the export trade. In spite of his elevated position at the Bank of Ireland, Arthur II was not keen to pay too much beer duty to the British rulers. At the time, duty was paid on ingredients - malt and hops -- not alcohol and Arthur hit upon a cunning plan: if he used a proportion of unmalted and therefore untaxed roasted barley, he could reduce his duty bill.

At a stroke, he improved the revenues of the brewery and, unintentionally, produced a new type of stout: darker and with a powerful character of burnt roasted grain. Purely as a tax dodge, Arthur II invented Dry Irish Stout, a style markedly different from the English versions of porter and stout.

Sales of Guinness boomed. By the end of the 19th century, the company was floated on the London Stock Exchange. It was brewing 1.2 million barrels a year and was for a time the biggest brewery in the world.

In 1904 the company built the first steel-framed building in the British Isles. It was called the Storehouse, where stout was fermented and left to mature before being bottled or racked into wooden casks. Today the Storehouse (right) is a museum and visitor centre.

In 1929, Guinness paid for its first-ever press advertisement in the London Daily Express. The simple message - "Guinness is Good for You" - was based on a report by doctors that a pint of stout a day was beneficial as a result of the beer's high iron and mineral content. The slogan was used for decades until the forebears of the Health & Safety Executive ruled that liquid containing malt, hops, yeast and pure water might be harmful rather than nutritious.

In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, Guinness was responsible for some of the most iconic poster and press advertising in the history of brewing. It took on the London agency, Bensons, who hired the artist John Gilroy to advance the cause of Irish stout. Gilroy used a menagerie of animals, including lions, sea lions, kangaroos and elephants to promote the beer and its perceived strength of purpose.

But the enduring advertisement from that period was the result of Gilroy teaming up with crime writer Dorothy L Sayers, who was a copywriter at Bensons. When Gilroy sketched a pelican with a glass of Guinness on his beak, Sayers suggested replacing that bird with a toucan and wrote the memorable lines:

"If he can say as you can Guinness is good for you, How good to be a Toucan: Just think what Toucan do".

go to Part II, including tasting notes on the family of Guiness stouts.