There is a constant stream of visitors passing through the brewery. A special office and staff is set aside for their reception. They come in from the street, and hand over their permit to a clerk, who in return for it supplies them with an illustrated guide book to the works, containing at the end a packet of half a dozen beautifully finished post cards of various parts of the works.
A visitor to the Guinness brewery reporting in The Kirkintilloch Herald - 19th August 1914
The Guinness Storehouse and the attractions contained within have been consistently topping the most visited places in Ireland for many years, and regardless of what people think of its history, heritage and beer there is no doubt that it has been a huge success from a tourism standpoint, enticing many a visitor to these shores and to the city of Dublin since it opened in 2000, replacing the older visitor’s centre in the Guinness Hop Store. According to Guinness’s own marketing, at The Storehouse you will ‘experience the history, heart, and soul of Ireland’s most iconic beer’ by means of multiple floors filled with all thing Guinness and Guinness related.
Visiting the famous St. James’s Street Brewery is not a new phenomenon and dates back quite far, as there were visitors getting a look inside those famous gates, and right into the brewery itself, well over a century ago at the very least. The guidebook shown here dates from 1914, the very year of the above quotation and sounds extremely like the one described in it, although sadly this one is missing the six postcards and the envelope from the back. The well-worn embossed cover with its wonderfully scrolled decoration and even the text itself evokes that era just at the start of the Art Nouveau period and this design appears to have been in use until a more durable and substantial hardbacked guidebook was introduced in the 1920s. There were earlier versions too such as one form 1897 titles “A Visit to St. James’s Gate Brewery Dublin” published by the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company in England mentioned in the Dublin Daily Express in August 1897 and an earlier one with the same title in the National Library of Ireland dated 1889 printed by Wilson, Hartnell & Co. of Dublin - incidentally, a company which is still operating today under a somewhat different if related guise.
The 1914 publication was printed by James Walker Ltd. from Rathmines, Dublin who claimed to be ‘Printers to the Brewery’ according to the end page of the booklet. The small volume features a brief history of the brewery as well as a description of what the visitor will see as they journey through the works. The brewing process is described in reasonable detail within its 16 printed pages of text as the visitor is taken through the newer of the two breweries on the site. Interestingly that journey included a visit to the then new fermenting house which was built in 1907, this is the building that currently houses the modern visitor’s centre with the Gravity Bar where people can try the beer perched on top. That 1914 tour also ended with some beer sampling, with four types being offered – ‘”Foreign” Stout for export to foreign countries; “Export” Stout for special trade; ordinary Double Stout, generally called Extra Stout; and Single Stout generally called Porter.’ Some facts are listed in the back of the booklet too, including that the brewery covers 50 acres; uses 180,000 acres of barley and 8,000 acres of hops; they were selling close to 100 million gallons of beer a year; the amount of duty paid by the company in 1913 was £1,368,355, which was almost triple what the next largest brewer on these islands paid; staff numbered 3,650; and the number of bottle labels issued daily put end to end would reach from Dublin to the Isle of man, and the total quantity issued in 1913 would stretch 26,000 miles, ‘or more than round the world.’
The descriptions and facts in the guide book had been written, assessed and vetted by Guinness and although they give quite a lot of interesting detail, it perhaps lack some of the more entertaining descriptions and interesting nuggets of information we might crave. For that we must turn to the words written by those who went on these tours and then wrote about them in newspapers and in other publications.
The Journal of the British Dental Association, Volume 9 published in 1888 does not at first glance seem to be somewhere to find a poetic and dramatic recount of a visit to the brewery but it contains a wonderful report of a visit to the Guinness site by someone who signs themselves ‘Stout and Mild’ regarding an excursion by the association to the James’s Gate Brewery in August of that year. It is peppered with the flowery prose that was quite common at this time.
“In companies of twenty the members of the Association, and their friends of both sexes, were led off by courteous guides holding high office in the establishment and were initiated into all its mysteries. Mysteries there were, sufficient even to satisfy a modern romance writer. Indeed, the wanderings of Rider Haggard's mysterious ‘She,’ in the bowels of her rocky African fortress, or of Virgil and Dante's in the infernal regions, sink into comparative insignificance when compared with the wanderings of the British Dental Association through this weird region of booming machines, steaming cauldrons, colossal mash tubs and frothing seas of darksome liquid.
Forward went the little companies, soon falling apart, by foaming torrents of sweet-wort dashing side by side with cooling streams, on either side endless plains of germinating grain. High above head advance parties could be seen threading their way across narrow bridges and looking small at the dizzy height, like roped gangs of mountaineers when viewed through telescopes from some Alpine valley. Onward still now peering through the Stygian darkness of unfathomable reservoirs filled with the fermenting liquor, whose heavy froth could dimly be seen rising and falling in sullen gloom as it emitted its deadly gaseous poison. On again now letting the eyes wander at leisure over veritable oceans of tranquil stout, calmly awaiting the right moment for ‘cooling down.’”
It would be quite difficult to find a more remarkable description of a tour of any brewery, and the writer continues …
“At this point the Association reassembled, and a dainty little railway train awaited. All being seated, the diminutive engine started off at a merry pace, but soon however entered a darksome tunnel which led by a spiral descent to a part of the establishment, on the level of the Liffey, where a new world opened up. Here the barrelling process held sway. Barrels in thousands were everywhere. Barrels were being made, mended and filled the stout being conducted in pipes from the storage vats. Little railways, both broad and narrow gauge, intersected in all directions. It was amusing to see the way in which the narrow gauge engines were made serviceable on the broader gauge when necessary. These little creatures were lifted bodily into the air by a sort of crane, where they snorted with evident delight at the prospect of their promotion, and were then let down into trucks on the broad gauge line, whose wheels by an ingenious arrangement they were able to keep in motion.
But one thing remained, and that was to taste the result of all this outcome of human ingenuity, skill and enterprise. The Association tasted and pronounced the result excellent.”
It is fascinating to hear amongst all of that flamboyant description how the narrow gauge engines were used on the larger gauge system – not to mention that wonderfully imagined thought of a ‘snort’ of delight that they gave at the knowledge of moving up in size!
Another professional group, The Society of Chemical Industry also reported on a visit to the brewery in 1891, which was published in The Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions in 1892, and although quite matter-of-fact compared to the above piece it relays some interesting ‘facts’ - although we must be quite wary of anything reported by visitors.
“About one tenth of the whole is roasted malt, giving the beer its characteristic colour and flavour, the rest being the ordinary dried variety Irish, Algerian and Tunisian barley are all used.”
So our writer is reporting that at this time 10% of the grains used in the brewery were roasted malt, and that some of the pale malt, or most likely the barley used to make the malt, was North African in origin. That same Algerian and Tunisian barley is mentioned as being used by Power & Son’s distillery, a place they visited before heading to Guinness’s. Indeed, a messenger had to be sent from the Guinness brewery to Power’s to find out where the visitors might be as it was feared they might have gone astray!
The writer continues the tour into the fermentation area.
"The requirements of the work [in cooling the fermenters] however made another machine necessary, and one with liquid carbon dioxide was put in. In order supply this it was suggested that the carbon dioxide given off during fermentation should be collected and compressed. This was done and the surplus sold other users of freezing machines worked by liquid CO2."
It appears from this report that Guinness were harvesting and reusing the carbon dioxide that was a by-product of brewing in their cooling systems, and were also selling it elsewhere at a price reported to be 4d per lb. and in bottles containing 25 lbs. each. This is certainly an ingenious and profitable way of making money from something that is essentially a waste product, and is something that is still being done by breweries to this day.
The report of the tour contained more information too, such as how the casks were cleaned in an ingenious way …
"The cask is placed in a cradle, is partly filled with hot water and closed by a bung to which a spiked iron chain is attached inside. The frame communicates a tumbling motion to the cask and at the same time rotates it about its major axis, so that the washing action of the water and the scraping action of the chain take place at every part of its interior."
The writer also goes on to mention how the rims of the casks are colour coded depending on what they contain, single stout (porter) being white, double stout the familiar red, and the export yellow. (Something that was reported by Alfred Barnard on his visit to the brewery for his books on the breweries of these islands around this time too, and Alfred goes into much more detail on the brewery, buildings, process and other details than any other author at this time.)
Our starting quote referenced a visit by an unknown writer in a newspaper to the brewery in 1914, the date of our guide book. The title of the piece was 'A Political Pilgrimage to Ireland – Visit to Guinness’ Brewery and in the article the writer impresses upon the reader just how ubiquitous Guinness is in the city of Dublin – this hasn’t changed in a century.
"Guinness’ Stout dominates Dublin. […] As soon as you pull up your blinds in the morning you see a line of barges making their way down to the harbour laden with barrels of stout. […] If you cross the street without due care you are apt to be run down by Guinness’ motor lorries rushing the stout down to the place of embarking [and] the firm’s traffic all but monopolises the streets of Dublin."
The author also mentions that all Guinness ‘motor men or bargemen may be known by their 'head gear' as they all wear ‘felt hats of orthodox shape with a black band of glaced [sic] leather going right over the crown from ear to ear.’ These appear to be bowler hats like the one shown here from a later guide book, with the band clearly visible.
Our visitor also tells us that at this time the site had 9 miles of railway track and 20 locomotive engines, and other figures such as the total amount of water used by the brewery is 7 billion gallons a year!
There are more figures to come, the above-mentioned fermenting house that is the current visitor’s centre was originally constructed with 2 million bricks and 3,650 tons of steel, along with 200 thousand cubic feet of concrete. That building contained 16 fermentation vessels with a total capacity of 208 thousand gallons. The vat house nearby contained 190 vats with a total storage capacity of almost 14 million gallons or 110 million pints or porter. Those were made of English oak and hooped with of half a mile of iron strapping. On the transport side of things, the stables housed 100 horses – mostly Shires and Clydesdales – and the company operated 60 motorised lorries that could reach the heady heights of 12 miles per hour. (That comment makes a mockery of the earlier comment about being run over by a ‘rushing’ vehicle! )1,500 new casks are made weekly and up to 15,000 casks can be filled daily, with a dozen being filled at once from each racking engine. (I truth, most of these figures had been pulled by the author from a slightly early edition of the souvenir guide, as the one shown here was printed a couple of months after their visit, but the design seems to be very similar if not the same.)
And lastly of course the author got to sample the produce – the same four variations mentioned above – ‘In neat aluminium mugs the visitor gets a fair sample of each, and with his breath turned makes his way into the outer world.’ It is of interest to see that right up to the end of the tour the focus is on the process and the product, with the sample beers at the end served in plain metal mugs. There is no hint at the marketing that would follow, where the idea of ritual, aesthetics and the drinking experience – rightly or wrongly - would perhaps become more important than the actual beer itself, although obviously you need to have a product before you build hype. That might make some people a little sad about how our brewing history has been reduced to products where we once had breweries, with beers like Smithwick’s as well as Guinness, and even the less well known Macardle’s each having essentially been compressed into a brand, and it could be argued that in doing so it severed their true historic connection to a richer and more varied past for many drinkers - a connection we should try to re-establish.
Regardless of all that, there is many a beer historian and others who would love a chance to experience the beers of this earlier era. Perhaps Guinness might oblige at some stage with a new/old exhibition where visitors get a chance to taste the porters of the past, preferably out of one of those aluminium mugs …?
Liam K
(Here is the link to object #3)
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