WATCH VIDEO: See how Kay Dillon of Okay’s Restaurant was taught to pour a Guinness

As with many culinary delights and quaffable adult beverages, one can easily get caught up in the lore or of traditions that go along with our delicacy of choice; or is it just marketing bull?

With the season O’ the Green upon us, your cynical Irish beer-writer would like you to take a closer look at the drink that if it were available on the Emerald isle during the days of St. Paddy, it would have surely been his tipple of choice… Guinness Stout, of course!

First of all, Guinness comes in many varieties other than the draught we are familiar with. Among them is extra stout, foreign extra stout and even something called Guinness extra cold. All of these versions have been produced to fill global market niches that were carved out by this well-known brewery. Guinness comes in bottles, cans and kegs. Guinness is brewed in several countries. Yes, you heard me correctly — not all Guinness is brewed in Dublin (but the kegged version is). Sorry to break it to you, but that bottle of Guinness you are drinking was probably brewed in Canada as a light-colored beer with something called GFE thrown in (Guinness Flavor Essence). I am not kidding and I don’t mean to cast a cloud on your lucky rainbow. If it makes you feel better, their “corporate Irish brewmaster” says it’s like adding a “little bit of Dublin”…

I find it ironic that a product that has been so violated by its mega-brewer owners (Diageo Inc.), is still veiled in some sort of puritanical orthodoxy that permeates around the subject of “Pouring the perfect pint of Guinness.” Even this ritualistic procedure has been the victim of “faux traditional bull-crap marketing.” Go back 10 or 15 years when the beer was owned by the Arthur Guinness Company. Brewery representatives were teaching a whole different “pouring ritual” than the one the Diageo boys teach today. 

I talked to Kay Dillon, owner of O’Kays (formerly Blues Etc.) across from the Clay Center in Charleston. She was trained over 10 years ago at a pub called Aidan’s in Rhode Island. The then “traditional Guinness pour” took around four minutes. The glass was not handled by the bartender during the pour. The glass was set under the faucet and the beer was allowed to fall, forming a great head which was then allowed to settle before adding the top-off addition — only then was it served.

Well, somehow I guess the ancient Guinness scrolls were lost during the buy-out because Diageo does it a whole different way. First, you have to find a corporate brewmaster with an Irish accent, and then you look at the metrics of a four-minute pour. What if we could cut that down to under two minutes, say? That would mean twice the productivity, right? Hey, and if we recommend that the beer be served colder, we could decrease the head formation. If the barkeep tips the glass at an angle and spins it while pouring, it would go really quickly and also help the yield. There you go! The new improved ancient traditional pouring method!

Honestly, I really don’t care and I actually understand the reasoning behind the new methodology. But either pour works for me. I am more concerned that my beer be served to me in a beer-clean, room temperature glass. I think much of the mystique of the “traditional” method is rooted in the fact that beer was served warmer in Ireland in the old days (15 years ago) and thus foamed up much easier, taking much longer to pour. The Irish and the English palate tended to enjoy a warmer, less-gassy beer, so that’s exactly what they got!

Now go out and enjoy your pint of Guinness! (Or if you want a great Irish style stout that doesn’t come with all the blarney and ritualistic baggage, go for a West Virginia brewed Mountaineer Stout this St. Patrick’s Day.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 6:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.