The Guinness Gestalt and the Pub Paradox
I’m not sure when exactly I fell for this pub, but I know the hours I’ve spent inside it have altered my perspective on pubs forever.
Call it prejudice or just good old-fashioned bias, but after getting properly into beer in 2010, I decided that a certain kind of pub wasn’t for me. The Fiddler’s Green – the Fidds to you and me – is an example of such a place.
The time I’ve spent inside this pub, typically most weekends since pubs reopened after lockdown ended in May 2021, gave me fresh perspective, gradually tearing down the bias I had created. It reminded me that pubs should be egalitarian spaces, their quality not merely defined by what beers are on tap.
Most of this time was spent drinking pints of Guinness. In fact, because I loved visiting the Fidds, I probably drank more of it than any other beer over the course of 2022. It’ll never make my beers of the year list, though. Sure, Guinness is the platonic ideal of a pint, combining the anticipation generated by its well-marketed enforced wait for that perfect serve with a glass of beer that, when presented, looks exactly as it does in your mind’s eye when poured by someone who knows what they’re doing.
But it doesn’t taste of much, really. Bar the merest hint of sweetness and a tiny amount of astringency that convinces you it’s refreshing, Guinness is devoid of any particular gastronomic quality. This is why it’s so good – because it doesn’t fire any part of your brain that makes you consider how it tastes; it just exists, sip by sip. Gestalt delivered by the 568-millilitre measure.
Pub Politics and the Guinness Conundrum
I also enjoy how, despite being perfectly designed to sit in the background of your thoughts, for fleeting moments, it can dominate a pub table. Say, for example, some members of your party decided to play the Guinness Game and devour those first gulps in an effort to get the line where the head meets beer perfectly in alignment between the Guinness branding and the harp logo. Then, inevitably, someone will argue that a true connoisseur will split the ‘G’ and gulp so that the line rests exactly at the midpoint of said letter. Regardless of which version you play, whoever invented it has devised the perfect way to get you drinking the first third of your pint in about 10 seconds, as well as convincing you to get another round in so you can try your luck all over again.
There is, however, a certain amount of guilt I have to process when I drink Guinness. I spend my working life telling people to drink local, support independent. And yeah, you absolutely should. But the older I get, the less I feel comfortable with telling people what to drink and judging them based on their choice at the bar. These days, my opinion is pretty much, “Drink what the hell you want, support independent where you can, but don’t get between me and my sweet G. I am dealing with enough already, thank you.”
I worry, though, that every time I drink a pint of Guinness, I am potentially crossing a picket line. In February 2023, workers at parent company Diageo’s bottling plant in Fife, Scotland, went on strike after the beverage giant reduced pay for new starters. It also bothers me that, in part due to Ireland’s idiosyncratic alcohol licensing laws, Diageo has the majority of Irish pubs stitched up.
While the system itself is complex and would require an entirely separate article to properly explain, the simplest way of making sense of it is as follows: In order for a pub to acquire a licence to sell alcohol in most circumstances, it must purchase an existing one, not a new one, limiting the number of new alcohol retailers that can open. Once a publican has successfully managed to acquire a license, they are not contractually obliged to stock products from specific producers. However, said producers may have installed and therefore own the dispense equipment or draught lines within the venue, or they might simply be doing deals with existing licensees that smaller producers simply cannot match. The end result is that the number of taps available to smaller producers is severely limited, creating challenging trading conditions directly influenced by their larger competitors.
Once upon a time, I interviewed the head brewer of an independent Irish brewery who was so angered by this that he couldn’t mention Guinness by name. The corporation’s leverage of Ireland’s licensed trade has made a mountain to climb for every small beer maker in the country, and it isn’t going to get any easier in a hurry.
The Pint of the Irish: Guinness as Cultural Icon
And yet, despite this, I have gradually witnessed the encroachment of Guinness into its modern role as both a status symbol among a certain generation of drinkers (it’s cool, you want to be seen drinking it) and as a signifier that you are fed up with the world and need a beer that helps you switch off. Its qualities of both blandness and refreshment make it perfect for today’s turbulent times. There’s no wonder that data firm CGA recently declared it to be the highest-selling beer by value in the United Kingdom, knocking Carling off a perch it’s stood upon for so long – it’s difficult to know what was the best seller before the ubiquitous lager came over from Canada in 1952.
It’s no surprise a recent piece by writer Ana Kinsella for food and culture publication Vittles, titled “Nine ways of looking at a pint of Guinness,” went viral, even among those who don’t drink it. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to back up the analytics. In recent months, I have watched as Guinness has encroached upon the taps of many pubs that once sought to promote only beer from small independent producers.
Bloomsbury Leisure Group, which owns a lot of venues with “Tap” in their name (Euston, Hackney, Waterloo, etc.), decided to put it on permanently, as it’s easier than making staff debate customers into drinking an alternative they don’t want. The Pembury Tavern in Hackney, owned by The Five Points Brewery, also now has a Guinness Tap. At the Sutton Arms in Barbican, you can choose between a sweet pint of G or the excellent London Black nitro porter from Anspach & Hobday. Except Guinness outsells every other beer on the bar here, even more so than the three lagers on offer.
Recently, while standing at the bar at Society – a food hall in central Manchester run by Vocation Brewery – on a packed-out Saturday night, I listened as a group of six men looked at the forty draught beers on offer before ignoring it and asking for six pints of Guinness. The bar doesn’t sell it, and so a discussion began as to what they could offer as an alternative. “I’ll just have an IPA,” one of them said. I wondered to myself how long before the staff crack and order it in just to make life easier for themselves.
The Art of the Pour: Mastering the Guinness Experience
Of course, just serving Guinness isn’t the answer. You have to invest in building up a reputation that you’re a decent custodian of such an iconic beverage. It’s important to acknowledge that there is some bad Guinness out there – in fact, it’s a vital part of its mythos. Bad Guinness is largely served by pubs that just don’t sell it fast enough, are foolhardy enough to connect it to the wrong gas mix, or don’t serve it through the correct creamer nozzle. Mostly, however, it’s consistently good from pub to pub. The rest is just marketing.
In some places, though, to me, it just seems to taste spectacular. The Thomas Connoly in Sligo, Lucky Joe’s Saloon in Fort Collins, Stoke Newington’s Auld Shillelagh, and my favourite spot for a G, The Fidds in Levenshulme, South Manchester. When I am in such a place, I wouldn’t want to drink anything else. It’s not just about the beer; it’s about achieving a certain blissful state of mind. I don’t want to think; I just want some pints.
Although the Fidds will be gone soon, sold to a property developer who I had the misfortune to bump into while waiting for a kebab recently one evening. They told me how they were going to gut the place and turn it into retail units after which they had the propensity to ask, “Do you drink there then?” “Yes,” I answered, “Most Sundays, in fact.” Sometimes we would go for a few beers elsewhere before someone would inevitably say, “Quick one in the Fidds,” before several hours were lost to many, many pints. Eventually, we just began skipping going elsewhere, instead heading directly to our final destination.
In the days leading up to its closure on the 12th of April 2023, we drank there as much as possible. I don’t begrudge the owners for selling – 33 years is a long time to run a pub, especially one that’s going to give you one hell of a retirement package. And it won’t affect me that much, really. I can easily go elsewhere. But I feel a tremendous sense of loss for those for whom this pub was the main or only place they went. Sure, there are other places nearby that are similar, but none of them are quite like the Fidds. I hope they find a similar place to laugh and drink and switch off from the world. And when they do, I hope to join them there every Sunday. Mine, sometimes begrudgingly, is a Guinness.
The Up & Under – where the only debate that matters is whether you take your Guinness with or without a shot.
