The case against Guinness

Boorishly tackling the zeitgeist

Café Bar by Edward Burra

Staring mindlessly into the blue light of my Instagram feed, I finally scrolled onto something that made sense. It was a photograph of three drinks: two cocktails and a Guinness. And upon a table next to these saccharine liquids, the Irish stout looked to be in its rightful place. It really looked at home.

The Argument

If you drink Guinness, it is assumed you know what you are talking about when it comes to beer. No faffing around with fizzy, homogenous lager or antiquated dark ales. No, you know what the real good stuff is. You are a cultivated member of drinking house society who loves the dark woody taste. The dark and creamy masculine oil.

If you believe the above, or anything along similar lines, you should stop doing so. For what Guinness really is is a symbol. People who drink it do not do so due to their superior taste, but because they are trying to indicate that they have taste. The next time you are in a pub in any of the UK’s major cities, look for yourself at the people that drink it. They will mostly be small groups of men in their late 20s, adorning tight fitting tee-shirts accompanied by neatly trimmed beards and a short back and sides. It is worth considering that every Nazi organisation mandated this monosyllabic cut which has become omnipresent in modern life. On the other end of the Guinness drinker spectrum, you will find those that wear ill-fitting beanie hats that fail to cover their ears, resembling an unrolled condom atop an egg. I am not saying there is anything wrong with such people, but one would not say they are surfing the frontier of good taste either.

After the first sip, you may be unlucky enough to hear one of such people mutter “Good pint of Guinness here”. The phrase obviously implies some form of value judgement. If the Lamb and Flag does a good pint of Guinness, presumably some other places do them less well, or even badly. But I’ve never heard the converse statement made. No Jack has ever taken a sip of their beloved stout and spat it back out in incredulous disgust. The phrase is therefore empty and meaningless. All it does is make the insecure lager drinker look in awe towards their supposedly superior neighbour and wonder how they ever acquired such a sophisticated palette. The next time you hear it said, assume the speaker knows nothing about beer and try not to find yourself bottlenecked at the side of the pub speaking to them.

Guinness might be for show, but so what? I hear you ask. It is not as if pretty much everything else in our highly digitised society that preaches dicta from Instagram is not for show either. And you have made a sensible point. If Guinness was just a misleading signalling device I would not mind that much. To be frank, in and of itself, I quite like the taste of the drink. But I cannot put up with the practical disruption it causes at bars. Barmen and women insist that in order to pour a ‘good’ Guinness, they have to pour half of it, let it settle for a seemingly interminable amount of time, before finishing the rest of it off. Consult the brewer’s website yourself to learn the didactic rules prescribed for perfect usage.

But are all these pyrotechnics and ensuing traffic jams necessary? Not at all. It does not matter whether the beer settles while it’s in your hand or on the bar. In each case the taste will be the same, according to research carried out by the Irish Times.¹ Guinness has used the technique to advance claims of the originality and character of its product.

Again, is there such a problem with being forced to wait that bit longer for your drink? Maybe this will inspire the ailing Sunak Government into creating a healthtopia policy whereby all drinks have to sit and settle behind the bar, making pub queues resemble a bad day at Gatwick Airport, thus encouraging all but the most committed drinkers to throw in the towel. Why not disrupt access to the toxic substance that is alcoholic, put a few hurdles between boozer and boozing? This will help us all drink less, and is this not an undeniably good thing? Well, no again. There is a strong case to be made that our generation is the most boring of recent times, and sadly Guinness has acted as a catalyst to this development.

In October last year, The Times ran a story detailing how Gen Z has less sex than its predecessors. The article included the opinion of Zak Asgard who said this was because “I don’t think our generation cares much about fun. Fun can wait. We need to sort out the rental crisis first”.²

And how was this level of banal puritanism ever reached? Guinness has certainly played its part. Those fleeting, impulsive moments that are facilitated by smooth transactions at the bar are whittled out by the Irish stout. Because of some over zealous marketing executive, you are forced to wait too long for your drink. Inevitably, the housing crisis will pop into your head, not just removing joy from that particular moment, but precluding fun for the rest of the night. Even if you have not ordered one for yourself, there will certainly be some fop from Haggerston up ahead order six for his mates. A certain amount of momentum and thoughtlessness is required to have real fun on a night out, to let it unfurl through its own inebriated logic, and Guinness is leaving us with too much time to think.

I appreciate that the opinions stated above will frustrate many of you. Guinness is an undeniably popular drink which tastes good in small quantities and acts as a fitting partner to seaborne dishes from places such as Clacton-on-Sea and Whitby. Still, one should scrutinise a product that seems to derive its perceived quality from being part of a trend. I take you back to my initial claim. Guinness really belongs to the realm of gauche cocktails. It is drunk for show and takes too long to pour. Indeed, the act of pouring it is a show in itself. If you are a true beer drinker, just go back to proper ales. Maybe that way life will be a lot more fun.

1. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/the-guinness-two-part-pour-is-just-a-marketing-ploy-1.3436716

2. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gen-z-sex-recession-society-comment-advice-tbhjb8bvp