Guinness Trivia
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40 free Guinness trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Guinness is a beer that comes with its own mythology: a lease measured in millennia, a harp that had to be drawn backwards, a plastic ball in every can, and a pour you are supposed to time. Most of the legend is true, some of it is marketing, and the gap between the two is where the best questions live. This quiz covers the stout and the brand rather than the record book: Arthur Guinness's early deals, the family that became Ireland's richest, the science behind the creamy head, the ad campaigns that became folk art, the export stout that conquered Africa, and the modern company that owns it all. It suits a pub table, a St Patrick's Day party or a night in with anyone who has ever waited for a pint to settle.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Guinness pours black, yet the brewer officially describes its colour as a very dark shade of what?
Ruby red
Guinness is officially a very dark ruby red, a colour that comes from roasting a portion of the barley before brewing.
Q 02In Guinness's 1999 ad 'Surfer', voted the best commercial of all time in a 2000 UK poll, waves turn into which animals?
White horses
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'.
Q 03Guinness plc merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to create which London-based drinks giant?
Diageo
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.
Q 04Whose death in 1861 is said to have moved a London club barman to mix stout with champagne as the Black Velvet?
Prince Albert
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.
Q 05Which slogan launched Guinness's first official advertising campaign in 1929?
Guinness is Good for You
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.
Q 06On Arthur's Day in 2009, drinkers were asked to toast Guinness's founder at what time, echoing the founding year?
17:59
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.
Q 07Which bird, drawn by John Gilroy for the S.H. Benson agency, became the most famous animal on Guinness posters?
The toucan
The toucan earned its place with a pun: its poster verse ended by asking drinkers to think what 'toucan' do.
Q 08In 2018 Guinness opened its first American brewery in 64 years in which Mid-Atlantic port city?
Baltimore
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.
Q 09Why does Arthur Guinness's 9,000-year lease on St. James's Gate no longer apply?
The brewery bought the site outright
The brewery bought the site outright as it grew far beyond the original four acres, so the lease is simply no longer in effect.
Q 10The Guinness Book of Records grew out of a Guinness executive's argument about Europe's fastest what?
Game bird
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.
Q 11The Guinness harp is modelled on a medieval instrument, the 'Brian Boru harp', kept at which Dublin institution?
Trinity College
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.
Q 12Benjamin Lee Guinness, the brewer who adopted the harp emblem, paid £150,000 in the 1860s to restore which Dublin landmark?
St Patrick's Cathedral
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.
Q 13What distinguishes the trademarked Guinness harp from the harp on Ireland's coat of arms?
Q 21The 'Guinness Four' were convicted in 1990 over which illegal tactic in the brewer's 1986 takeover of Distillers?
Rigging its own share price
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.
Q 22Michael Ash, a mathematician turned brewer, gave Draught Guinness its creamy surge in 1959 by adding which gas?
Nitrogen
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.
Q 23What is the hollow plastic ball inside a can of Draught Guinness called?
A widget
It faces the opposite way
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.
Q 14When Guinness floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1886, what distinction did St. James's Gate hold?
Largest brewery in the world
The largest brewery in the world had got there without a single advertisement: Guinness refused to advertise at all until 1929.
Q 15Edward Cecil Guinness founded the Guinness and Iveagh Trusts in London and Dublin to provide what?
Homes for the poor
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.
Q 16Which Hampstead mansion did Edward Cecil Guinness leave to the nation with his paintings as the 'Iveagh Bequest'?
Kenwood House
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.
Q 17Iveagh House, the Guinness mansion given to the Irish state in 1939, is now home to which government department?
Foreign Affairs
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.
Q 18Lord Ardilaun of the brewing family bought, landscaped and gave which central Dublin park to the public in 1880?
St Stephen's Green
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.
Q 19Diana Mitford left her husband, the brewing heir Bryan Guinness, for which British politician?
Oswald Mosley
Oswald Mosley married her in secret in 1936 in the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler among the guests.
Q 20Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, Britain's minister in the Middle East, was assassinated by Lehi in 1944 in which city?
Cairo
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.
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.
Q 24Guinness became suitable for vegans once its brewers stopped clarifying it with isinglass, which is made from what?
Fish bladders
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.
Q 25Which statistical test did Guinness brewer William Sealy Gosset publish in 1908 under the pen name 'Student'?
The t-test
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.
Q 26The two-part pour of a pint of Draught Guinness is usually said to take how long from start to finish?
119.5 seconds
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'.
Q 27Which crime novelist worked on Guinness's early advertising campaigns as a copywriter at the S.H. Benson agency in the 1920s?
Dorothy L. Sayers
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.
Q 28Which Blade Runner actor fronted Guinness's surreal 'Pure Genius' adverts in Britain from 1987?
Rutger Hauer
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.
Q 29In Guinness's 1994 ad 'Anticipation', Joe McKinney dances to a Pérez Prado mambo while waiting for what?
His pint to settle
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.
Q 30Guinness's award-winning 2005 ad 'noitulovE' sends three London pub drinkers backwards through what?
Evolution
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.