40 Fun Facts About Guinness

Guinness pours black, yet the brewer officially describes its colour as a very dark shade of what?

Guinness is officially a very dark ruby red, a colour that comes from roasting a portion of the barley before brewing.

In Guinness's 1999 ad 'Surfer', voted the best commercial of all time in a 2000 UK poll, waves turn into which animals?

White horses is an old name for foam-topped waves, and the ad makes the phrase literal: its breakers turn into stallions, an image borrowed from Walter Crane's painting 'Neptune's Horses'.

Guinness plc merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to create which London-based drinks giant?

Diageo's name, coined by the branding agency Wolff Olins, joins the Latin dies (day) to the Greek root geo (world): it was meant to say pleasure every day, everywhere.

Whose death in 1861 is said to have moved a London club barman to mix stout with champagne as the Black Velvet?

Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort, is the man the Black Velvet is said to mourn: the story goes that even the champagne was to be put into black.

Which slogan launched Guinness's first official advertising campaign in 1929?

Guinness is Good for You came out of market research: when the brewery asked drinkers about its stout, they said they felt good after a pint.

On Arthur's Day in 2009, drinkers were asked to toast Guinness's founder at what time, echoing the founding year?

The toast was at 17:59 for 1759, the year Arthur Guinness signed his lease: the first Arthur's Day marked the brewery's 250th anniversary, and the event was dropped after 2013.

Which bird, drawn by John Gilroy for the S.H. Benson agency, became the most famous animal on Guinness posters?

The toucan earned its place with a pun: its poster verse ended by asking drinkers to think what 'toucan' do.

In 2018 Guinness opened its first American brewery in 64 years in which Mid-Atlantic port city?

The Baltimore brewery was never meant for the classic stout, which went on being shipped from Dublin; it made Guinness Blonde lager and experimental beers instead.

Why does Arthur Guinness's 9,000-year lease on St. James's Gate no longer apply?

The brewery bought the site outright as it grew far beyond the original four acres, so the lease is simply no longer in effect.

The Guinness Book of Records grew out of a Guinness executive's argument about Europe's fastest what?

Game bird: after a shooting party in County Wexford, Sir Hugh Beaver could find the answer in no reference book, so he had the McWhirter twins compile one as a Guinness promotion for ending pub arguments.

The Guinness harp is modelled on a medieval instrument, the 'Brian Boru harp', kept at which Dublin institution?

Trinity College shows the harp in the Long Room of its library; the name is a romance, since it was made centuries after the high king Brian Boru died.

Benjamin Lee Guinness, the brewer who adopted the harp emblem, paid £150,000 in the 1860s to restore which Dublin landmark?

St Patrick's Cathedral was restored at his own expense and without an architect; a few years later the whiskey distiller Henry Roe paid to rebuild Christ Church across town.

What distinguishes the trademarked Guinness harp from the harp on Ireland's coat of arms?

It faces the opposite way: the brewery had trademarked a right-facing harp in 1876, so the Irish Free State, adopting the same harp in 1922, had to turn its own to face left.

When Guinness floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1886, what distinction did St. James's Gate hold?

The largest brewery in the world had got there without a single advertisement: Guinness refused to advertise at all until 1929.

Edward Cecil Guinness founded the Guinness and Iveagh Trusts in London and Dublin to provide what?

Homes for the poor were only part of it: in Dublin he also paid for public baths, a hostel and a covered market for the street traders his clearances had displaced.

Which Hampstead mansion did Edward Cecil Guinness leave to the nation with his paintings as the 'Iveagh Bequest'?

Kenwood House was his for barely two years: he bought it in 1925, died in 1927 and left it to the public with 63 paintings, a Rembrandt self-portrait and a Vermeer among them.

Iveagh House, the Guinness mansion given to the Irish state in 1939, is now home to which government department?

Foreign Affairs works in what was once two Georgian townhouses: Benjamin Lee Guinness bought both in the 1860s and knocked them into one, and his grandson Rupert gave the result to the state.

Lord Ardilaun of the brewing family bought, landscaped and gave which central Dublin park to the public in 1880?

St Stephen's Green reopened on 27 July 1880, and a grateful city put up a statue of Ardilaun that still stands across from the Royal College of Surgeons.

Diana Mitford left her husband, the brewing heir Bryan Guinness, for which British politician?

Oswald Mosley married her in secret in 1936 in the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler among the guests.

Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, Britain's minister in the Middle East, was assassinated by Lehi in 1944 in which city?

Moyne was shot outside his Cairo home; his two assassins were hanged there in 1945, and thirty years later Egypt returned their bodies to Israel in exchange for prisoners.

The 'Guinness Four' were convicted in 1990 over which illegal tactic in the brewer's 1986 takeover of Distillers?

Rigging its own share price helped Guinness outbid a rival for Distillers; the scheme came to light when the American trader Ivan Boesky described it during his plea bargain.

Michael Ash, a mathematician turned brewer, gave Draught Guinness its creamy surge in 1959 by adding which gas?

Nitrogen forms far smaller bubbles than carbon dioxide and barely dissolves, so the beer can be pushed out under high pressure without turning fizzy: hence the creamy head.

What is the hollow plastic ball inside a can of Draught Guinness called?

A widget does in the can what the pub tap does at the bar: it sets off the surge of tiny bubbles that builds the stout's creamy head.

Guinness became suitable for vegans once its brewers stopped clarifying it with isinglass, which is made from what?

Fish bladders, dried, give isinglass, which clumps the yeast so that it sinks to the bottom of the vat; traces could reach the drinker, so a new filter replaced it.

Which statistical test did Guinness brewer William Sealy Gosset publish in 1908 under the pen name 'Student'?

The t-test was built for a brewer's problem: Gosset had only a handful of barley samples to judge by, where the statisticians of his day worked with hundreds.

The two-part pour of a pint of Draught Guinness is usually said to take how long from start to finish?

119.5 seconds is the figure usually quoted; in the 1990s Guinness made a virtue of its slow serve with the slogan 'Good things come to those who wait'.

Which crime novelist worked on Guinness's early advertising campaigns as a copywriter at the S.H. Benson agency in the 1920s?

Dorothy L. Sayers put her years at Benson's to use: her 1933 detective novel Murder Must Advertise is set in a London advertising agency.

Which Blade Runner actor fronted Guinness's surreal 'Pure Genius' adverts in Britain from 1987?

Rutger Hauer was dressed to mirror the drink: as 'The Man with the Guinness' he wore black beneath his blond hair, a pint's dark body and pale head in human form.

In Guinness's 1994 ad 'Anticipation', Joe McKinney dances to a Pérez Prado mambo while waiting for what?

His pint to settle: the whole ad is the wait for a slow pour, and its mambo, Pérez Prado's 'Guaglione', was released as a single and went to number one in Ireland.

Guinness's award-winning 2005 ad 'noitulovE' sends three London pub drinkers backwards through what?

Evolution, as the title says in reverse: the three men regress all the way to mudskippers at a puddle, where one of them grimaces at the taste of the water.

Guinness's African ads from 1999 starred an action hero whom the BBC called 'Africa's very own' who?

James Bond was the model for Michael Power, who existed only in Guinness adverts until 2003, when the brewer gave its hero a feature film of his own, Critical Assignment.

Why was Guinness Foreign Extra Stout, the export version, brewed with far more hops than the Draught?

To preserve it at sea: hops are a natural preservative, and the beer began in 1801 as West India Porter, brewed strong and bitter to survive the voyage to the Caribbean.

Guinness's first brewery outside Ireland and the UK, opened with the United Africa Company in the early 1960s, is where?

Nigeria was by then Guinness's biggest export market, so shipping gave way to brewing on the spot, at Ikeja in Lagos; breweries in Malaysia, Cameroon and Ghana followed.

After a government ban on imported barley, the Guinness brewed in one African country switched to which local grain?

Sorghum, roasted dark and sometimes mixed with maize, took the place of the banned barley malt, and the result tastes distinctly different from the stout brewed in Dublin.

At Dublin's Guinness Storehouse, a paid extra called the Stoutie prints what on the creamy head of a visitor's pint?

Their selfie is printed onto the foam by a specialised drinks printer, using an edible ink made from malt extract.

Guinness 0.0, the alcohol-free stout launched in 2020, was pulled from sale almost immediately for what reason?

Contamination by microbes led Guinness to recall every can two weeks after launch as a precaution, warning that some might be unsafe to drink; the stout returned in 2021.

Guinness's illuminated sign and giant clock were once a fixture of which London landmark?

Piccadilly Circus shows how fast the brewery changed its mind: it ran no advertising at all until 1929, yet a photograph of 1942 already shows its sign among the Circus's famous lights.

Which architect of Battersea Power Station and the red telephone box designed Guinness's Park Royal brewery in London?

Giles Gilbert Scott's brewery supplied Britain for almost seventy years; when it closed in 2005 and was pulled down, brewing for the British market went back to Dublin.

The seven-floor Guinness Storehouse in Dublin is built around a soaring central atrium shaped like what?

The atrium is shaped like a pint glass and rises through a 1902 fermentation plant, with a copy of Arthur Guinness's lease set into the floor at its base.

The 1902 fermentation block that now houses the Guinness Storehouse was Ireland's first multi-storey what?

It was the first multi-storey steel-framed building in Ireland, a fermentation plant that worked until 1988 before reopening as the Storehouse in 2000.