Stout and about: Why is everyone ordering a pint of Guinness?

Pubs are not the same as they once were.

Once upon a time, they kept food to ham or cheese rolls, served wine of two kinds (red or white) and didn’t do music beyond a regular on the piano. Once upon a time, pubs — at least this side of the Irish Sea — were no guarantee of finding Guinness.

If the first three examples speak to a world long since disappeared, being hard up for a Guinness is no lifetime ago. Until 2005, it was so slow to shift in English pubs that the brewery pasteurised it to give it a longer shelf life. By 2011, it was so unpopular that the day after then President Barack Obama was pictured with a pint, 400 jobs were cut in cost-saving measures.

‘When I moved to London 10 years ago, I would get people telling me where to go to get a good pint of Guinness and, frankly, it was usually awful,’ observes Aaron Wall, a Dublin-born bartender who now runs a brace of venues in the capital, Homeboy, N1, and The Prince, EC1. He knows his pints — Guinness asked him to train the team at Covent Garden’s new £73 million Guinness Open Gate Brewery — and his years in London have coincided with the astonishing resurgence of a brand that had been largely unloved since its pre-Second World War heyday. For decades it tried, and failed, to shake off its reputation as a heavy old man’s drink, from 1979’s Guinness Lite (‘Ladies’ Guinness’ to punters, if you can believe it) to the wheat beer Guinness Breo in the 1990s.

Now, the stuff roars down the lines: since 2023, industry estimates suggest one in every nine pints poured in the UK is a Guinness. Around the world, 10 million pints of it are sunk every day. What’s interesting is that this resurgence doesn’t speak to stout in general, or at least the kinds of big, boozy, treacle-soaked stouts that often lurk in craft beer places. Guinness has a style of its own, sometimes called Irish dry stout, a term invented for the Dublin beer.

‘Guinness is called a pint of plain for a reason; it’s just good, plain stout that goes down easy,’ says Dublin-based Daragh Curran, who in the past few years has picked up more than half a million followers on social media as ‘the Guinness guru’. Yet there are others doing something similar, both old and new. Murphy’s (established in 1856) and Beamish (1792), both founded in Cork, are extremely similar: ‘Murphy’s I love; a little bit of a sweeter, more chocolatey taste than Guinness. Beamish has the more smoked, roasted flavour, more of an acquired taste,’ says Daragh. He’s also a fan of O’Hara’s, rarely seen in British pubs.

The Guinness style of stout is non-traditional: stout originated as a term for a strong porter beer and, for a century, there was no difference between the two. Even now the difference is slight: porters are traditionally sweeter, marked by chocolate notes; stouts are usually darker in colour, more bitter, and taste more like coffee. However, neither began in Dublin. ‘Porter and stout were as much London as Irish,’ notes chef Richard Corrigan. ‘Unfortunately, the Napoleonic wars came along, and [in Britain] the grain went to feeding horses for Wellington’s Peninsular wars. Of course, the Irish didn’t agree and kept brewing their porter with their barley. There is a whole thing of stout being Irish, but I think it’s very much a London drink.’ In other words, when Britain was off fighting France, Dublin’s St James’s Gate Guinness brewery made haste.

As then, today: Guinness’s astonishing popularity means others are now trying to muscle into the market: Brewdog has released Black Heart and Jeremy Clarkson’s Hawkstone brand launched its Black Nitro Stout. Even Marks & Spencer sells cans of Black Nitro. There is no escaping the black stuff.

Why has it come back? Daragh thinks the brewer had almost nothing to do with it — or at least, not in the way it might like. ‘I would put it down to the fact that when the pubs were closed [in the pandemic], people’s appetites really built up: you could get a can of Heineken or Stella at home, but Guinness was totally different. By the time the pubs reopened…’ In other words, Guinness can’t make a canned beer good enough to rival what’s poured in the local boozer. The company’s other slip-up was to run out over Christmas 2024: it helped open the market for Murphy’s, Beamish and all the others.

Why does the pub beat the can? Partly because pubs share lines for lagers, but Guinness uses its own systems and pushes the beer through taps pressured with a mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The nitrogen produces smaller bubbles, creating the beer’s trademark creaminess and preserving its head. Much has been made of Irish pubs running a ratio of 75:25 nitrogen/carbon dioxide and British pubs sticking to 70:30. How much does it matter? Guinness owner Diageo is strict in Britain, but some landlords are known to take matters into their own hands to do it like home. ‘The first time the Guinness technician came in to commission the lines, I wouldn’t let him near the cellar until we’d had a chat,’ says Aaron. ‘And then we worked on everything from the cooler to the pressure…’ He is far from the only one.

Temperature matters, as does glassware; some people swear the type of tap makes a difference. There is talk of the schtick, the two-part pour, splitting the G. The dome on the pint’s head. The countless nicknames. Those conversations are both fuelling and are fuelled by social media — Daragh is not the only Guinness influencer — and that in turn has spilled into real life, even inspiring clothing ranges, from JW Anderson to Next.

If this all seems nerdy, that’s partly the point, argues Oisin Rogers, whose London pub The Devonshire, W1, legendarily serves more Guinness than anywhere else in the world. People like to delve into things. Is that more important than the drink itself? ‘I listen to people talking about what they think of what’s in their glass every day. When it comes down to it, the taste of it is actually bland,’ he says. ‘When people get talking about the variances and the differences and the complexities of it, they become engrossed in the wrong stories, the wrong points of view. But it’s non-political and non-divisive and it happens in a space where there is no possibility of offence being taken. It brings people together.’