Christmas saw an unexpected shortage in pubs across the UK. Because of unprecedented demand, Guinness was severely rationed by Diageo, the British drinks conglomerate that owns Ireland’s most-famous export.
The iconic stout, sold in 120 countries around the world, has long enjoyed popularity on this side of the Irish Sea, but in times past it was most often associated with Irish labourers or lonely blokes nursing their opaque beers in quiet despair.
It was distinctive and authentic, especially with its instantly recognisable harp emblem, but not really sexy. All that has changed in recent years, partly driven by a social media craze and, inevitably, the fashion dictates of those modern-day style commandants: influencers.
Nowadays, the done thing among young people is to film themselves “splitting the G”. That’s to say, attempting in one gulp to drink exactly the right amount to bring the brim of the beer down to the midpoint of the “G” on the Guinness-labelled glass into which, in a brilliant stroke of marketing, the black nectar is always poured.
You might think there were more interesting or profitable ways to spend your time, like reading Proust or mastering Japanese, but the trend has caught on with that considerable sector of the market that is never entirely comfortable unless sharing images of themselves doing the latest thing. And suddenly there’s not enough Guinness to go around.
One of the remarkable things about Guinness is that stout isn’t very difficult to make, and there are plenty of other stouts available every bit as good, if not better, than Guinness. But none of them has Guinness’s brand image or history, or glasses with their names on.
Stout, or porter as it was originally called, is in fact an English beer. It was Arthur Guinness, a Protestant from County Kildare, who took the idea back to Ireland and began brewing his own version in 1778. By coincidence, a major TV drama, House of Guinness, is currently being filmed, which will cover the many triumphs and tribulations of a family that grew fabulously rich on the success of the drink named after them.
It’s a tale that, like the beer itself, is strong with dark overtones and a lot of signature froth. In keeping with a familiar evolution of dynasties, the Guinnesses, within a few generations, went from hardworking entrepreneurs to arty bohemians, wild eccentrics and models and muses.
In the 1920s, Bryan Guinness was one of the Bright Young Things satirised by Evelyn Waugh. He married Diana Mitford, who then ditched him for the British fascist and acolyte of Hitler, Oswald Mosley.
Bryan’s father, the first Baron Moyne, was shot dead by a Zionist paramilitary group in Cairo in 1944, and there have been many other shockingly curtailed lives in the Guinness family tree.
Perhaps the most notable was 21-year-old Tara Browne, who crashed his Lotus sports car in London in December 1966, an incident that was the inspiration for the Beatles’ A Day in the Life – “He blew his mind out in a car”. John Lennon, who wrote that lyric, was a friend. And Paul McCartney was apparently given LSD for the first time by Browne.
The most conspicuous family member these days is arguably Daphne Guinness, ex-wife of the Greek shipping magnate Spyros Niarchos, who was also the muse of Karl Lagerfeld and is the on-off lover of the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. She is known for her Cruella de Vil-like hairstyle and wearing clothes that are not exactly designed for warmth or comfort.
They all add to gaiety of nations and to the Guinness mythology, that mysterious quality from which it appears increasing numbers of people still want to drink deeply.
