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?

The crashing breakers become white horses, an image lifted from Walter Crane's 1893 painting 'Neptune's Horses'.

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

Diageo's name, coined by branding agency Wolff Olins, joins the Latin dies (day) with the Greek root geo (earth).

Which royal's death in 1861 led a Brooks's Club bartender to invent the Black Velvet, stout mixed with champagne?

The Black Velvet mourned Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort, on the notion that even the champagne should be in mourning.

How much beer did Arthur Guinness ship to England on 19 May 1769, the brewery's very first export?

The first export was just 6.5 barrels; by 1914 the brewery was turning out 2.652 million barrels a year.

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; Arthur's Day ran for five years before its last outing in 2013.

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

Gilroy's toucan became as much a symbol of Guinness as the harp, and in 2006 the brewery even named a beer, Toucan Brew, after it.

In 2018 Guinness opened its first American brewery in 64 years in which city?

The Baltimore, Maryland site brewed Guinness Blonde lager and experimental beers rather than the classic stout; its main plant closed in 2023, and the previous US brewery had shut in 1954.

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

The brewery bought the site outright as it grew far beyond the original four acres, so the lease is simply no longer in effect.

Before Dublin, Arthur Guinness ran his first brewery from 1755 in which County Kildare town on the River Liffey?

Leixlip was a three-storey brewery running from the street to the Liffey, bought with money left to Arthur by his godfather.

Arthur Guinness's godfather and namesake Arthur Price, whose 1752 will helped fund him, held which church office?

Price became Archbishop of Cashel in 1744, one of the Church of Ireland's most prestigious posts, and had employed both Arthur and his father.

Which grandson of the original Arthur adopted the harp as the St. James's Gate brewery's emblem in 1862?

Benjamin Lee Guinness chose the harp, which was registered as a trademark in 1876 soon after Britain's first trademark act.

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

It faces the opposite way: the Guinness harp faces right, so the Irish state registered its harp facing left to stay clear of the brewery's trademark.

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

St. James's Gate was the largest brewery in the world by 1886, with an output of 1.2 million barrels a year, having been Ireland's largest since 1838.

Edward Cecil Guinness, Ireland's richest man after floating two-thirds of the firm in 1886, retired at what age?

He retired a multi-millionaire at 40, having raised £6 million from the float, and later gave much of it away to housing charities in London and Dublin.

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

Kenwood House, on the edge of Hampstead Heath, became a public museum for his collection after his death in 1927.

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

Foreign Affairs moved into Iveagh House after Rupert Guinness, Lord Iveagh, handed the 1736 building to the state in 1939.

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.

Which brewing heir did Diana Mitford marry in 1929, seven years before she wed fascist leader Oswald Mosley?

Bryan Guinness, later the 2nd Baron Moyne, lost her to Mosley; she was known as Diana Guinness until she married Mosley in secret in Berlin in 1936.

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

Moyne was shot in Cairo on 6 November 1944 by the Zionist group Lehi, a killing that shocked Palestine and the wider world.

Guinness's 1986 takeover of which Scotch whisky group led to the share-rigging trial of the 'Guinness Four'?

Distillers was far bigger than Guinness, so executives secretly propped up the Guinness share price during the £4 billion bid, a scheme exposed by Ivan Boesky's plea bargain.

Which mathematician turned brewer devised the nitrogen dispense system that became Draught Guinness in 1959?

Michael Ash's 'Easy Serve' project put nitrogen into the pour, and he is credited as the inventor of nitro beer.

Guinness's own name for the floating widget introduced in 1997, which fixed cans overflowing when warm, is what?

The Smoothifier is a hollow plastic ball that replaced the original 1989 disc widget, which worked only if the can was served cold.

Guinness's 1969 research into canned draught stout, patented by two St. James's Gate brewers, was code-named what?

Project ACORN stood for Advanced Cans Of Rich Nectar, and its false-lid gas chamber was patented in 1969 before the idea lay dormant until 1984.

The 7 cm widget inside a bottle of Guinness, unlike the ball in a can, is nicknamed after which object?

The 'rocket widget' is a 7 cm tube with a small hole at the bottom, while the can version is a hollow sphere a little smaller than a table-tennis ball.

Guinness says the two-part 'perfect pour' of a pint, settling wait included, should take exactly how long?

Guinness puts the whole ritual at 119.5 seconds, a precision that is pure theatre: modern dispense systems no longer need the pause, but the wait makes the drink feel special.

Which crime novelist is credited with creating the 1920s slogan 'Guinness is Good for You' at the S.H. Benson agency?

Dorothy L. Sayers wrote the line after market research found drinkers said they felt good after a drink; such health claims are now banned in Irish alcohol advertising.

Which Dutch actor fronted Guinness's darkly humorous late-1980s UK ads under the slogan 'Pure Genius'?

Rutger Hauer's 'Pure Genius' spots ran from the late 1980s into the early 1990s, extolling the brewing with deliberately dark humour.

Joe McKinney's dance in Guinness's 1994 'Anticipation' ad sent which Pérez Prado mambo to number one in Ireland?

Guaglione reached number one in Ireland and number two in the UK after the ad, which used jump cuts to make McKinney's moves impossible in reality.

Guinness's 2005 ad 'noitulovE' rewinds evolution from a London pub until three drinkers become which creatures?

The three men regress all the way to mudskippers, in a Daniel Kleinman-directed spot that won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix and was among 2006's most-awarded commercials.

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

James Bond was the comparison for the Power character, whose campaign ran until 2006, by which time it was one of the best-known alcohol ads in Africa.

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

Brewers added hops to preserve it at sea: the extra hops were a natural preservative for long voyages, and at around 7.5% ABV the beer is also much higher in alcohol.

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

Nigeria had become Guinness's largest export market by 1962, taking around 100,000 barrels a year, so a brewery was built at Ikeja in Lagos.

After a 1986 ban on barley imports, the stout brewed in Guinness's biggest African market switched to which local grain?

Heavily roasted sorghum, sometimes with maize or wheat, replaced malted barley after the government briefly banned barley imports, and the switch stuck.

At the Perfect Pint bar in the Guinness Storehouse, visitors can have what printed on the creamy head of their own pour?

Their selfie goes on the foam at the Perfect Pint bar, one stop in a seven-floor attraction that has drawn more than twenty million visitors since it opened in 2000.

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

Contamination forced the recall, and the 0.0 was relaunched in 2021, reaching pubs in July and cans by late August.

Guinness's neon sign, a London fixture from the 1930s until the early 1980s, stood at which landmark?

Piccadilly Circus carried the Guinness neon for half a century, alongside the brand's poster slogans such as 'Lovely Day for a Guinness'.

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

Giles Gilbert Scott's Park Royal brewery, built 1933-35 to supply Guinness to Britain, closed in 2005 and was demolished the following year.

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.