I Drank a Guinness, and Now I Feel Like Hurling

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September 2nd 2007

Published: October 24th 2007

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Mary in Gloucestershire

A Guinness and the Factory of Its Birth

No, not hurling. Hurling! (And those are links, so click on them. In order!)

How could I say I had been to Ireland without exploring Dublin? Especially since I flew in and out of there.

I got up and packed up my things and headed out, but not before having a full Irish breakfast. It seemed to be very similar to the full English breakfast, except for the presence of black pudding (known in other languages as "blood pudding" - 'nuf said) and something else unidentifiable. I ate the egg, toast with jam, beans, and tomato and avoided the black pudding. (Been there, done that, don't feel the need to try it again.) I hesitantly took a bite of the other round, tan, breaded patty. Hmmm... not bad. So I asked my waiter:
"What is this?"
"What pudding?"
"No, I know it's pudding, but what kind of pudding?"
"What pudding!"
(Who's on first?) Seeing my confusion, he turned to the only other people in the place, all of whom were shovelling the full Irish breakfast in their mouths, and all of whom seemed to be wearing lots of green, including green and white braided yarn around their necks. Odd.

Up into the giant pint glass in the sky

He asked them, "How can I explain what pudding?" Turns out it was white pudding, and I just didn't understand the accent. Makes sense, though... white pudding, black pudding... I still don't have a clue what was in it, but it was pretty good. As the beyarned breakfasters left, my waiter wished them good luck.

I got in the car and started navigating towards Dublin. It being Sunday morning, not that many museums or sights were open yet. However, one was, so I headed straight for it.

The Guinness Museum.

Strangely, I wasn't the only one out and about. I began to notice lots more people dyed green driving in cars burdened with festoons of green... and a couple people in yellow. Turns out the final national hurling championships were to take place that day in Dublin in Croke Park Stadium, which holds 82,500 unintelligibly screaming Irish hurling fans in green (Limerick) and yellow (Kilkenny). As exciting as that sounded, I had other plans.

The Guinness Museum.

The Guinness Museum is located right next to the factory. It doesn't get fresher than that. The building it's in actually used to be a brewhouse for the

Arthur Guinness's original lease for the brewery property

stuff, but then they renovated it to become a 7-floor "experience." The entire inside is filled with industrial-style steel beams. If you look up, you notice that the space in the middle, where the escalators are, takes the shape of a giant Guinness pint which, if it had sides and were filled, would hold a whopping 14 million pints. You're supposed to start at the bottom and work your way up to the Gravity Bar on the top. The theory is that by the time you go through the entire museum and get to the top, you're salivating for your "free" Guinness, to be enjoyed with lovely 360-degree panoramic views of Dublin. (If it were truly free, the entry fee wouldn't have cost quite so much, but I digress.) I walked in, inspected the original lease for the property signed by Arthur Guinness in 1759 (45 pounds a year for 9,000 year - what a bargain!), bought my ticket, and was told that the power was out in some of the exhibits. However, if I'd like to start at the Gravity Bar with a Guinness, then they'd let us know when the power was back on, which should be shortly.

You have to let the Guinness sit before you drink it.

So 9:30 am on a Sunday morning in Dublin found me having a Guinness Breakfast of Champions. And ironically enough, the moment I stepped out of the elevator, a song by Irish group U2 came on the overhead radio. It was a fairly cloudy day out, but the views were still nice. Your ticket for your free Guinness is a tab on a little paperweight filled with a drop of Guinness - your free souvenir to keep. But don't grab your Guinness right after the nice Guinness barmaids pull it out of the tap - they'll yell at you that it has to sit for a minute. (No, it wasn't me, it was the guy behind me. I knew better.)

Power on (the museum, with electricity) and powered up (me, with Guinness), I went back down to the first floor and started my way up again. The entire attitude of this place is that Arthur Guinness deserves to be deified for his strange alchemy of 4 simple ingredients - barley, hops, yeast, and water. They let you taste roasted barley (it hits you in the back of the throat), wax poetic about the freshness of the hops, gush

Yes, I enjoyed my free Guinness with spectacular views.

over the pureness of the water from the nearby mountains, and then rhapsodize about the yeast - propagated through the centuries from the very same yeast that Arthur himself used in the first batches. To ensure the consistency, they even keep some in a ridiculously secure safe that requires you to trade your first-born child for the combination.

The next part of the museum talks about how they are combined. There was a tall Irishman in a white lab coat standing in front of a big diagram board with flashing lights. Well, we all know flashing lights distract me, so I plowed in and started asking thoughtful questions about the process. It probably helped that I'd already had a Guinness and was feeling slightly giddy. Anyway, the guy really got into it, with giant arm gestures and everything. Turns out the charm offensive was of use, because about every 90 minutes, a new batch of Guinness starts in the factory next door. And to get that batch to start going through the system represented in blinking lights, they pick one lucky soul out of the crowd to push the big red button. Yes, folks, somewhere out there is a

View of Trinity College, Dublin

batch of Guinness with my name on it. (Note: They were supposed to email me and tell me where in the world my barrels of Guinness went, but... they didn't. Jerks. So if you're in a bar and see my name on a barrel of Guinness, or maybe stamped with the number "1400" - will you please let me know?) I got a picture of the epic moment - but I have no idea why I'm making such a weird face.

Next you go to the test kitchen, where I got to taste a limited edition of another type of Guinness. Then a wander through an advertising and memorabilia section. I particularly liked the part dedicated to John Gilroy, the man famous for drawing all those "My Goodness! My Guinness!" cartoon ads. These were the originals, and they were quite lovely. Finally, I finished with a stop at the ginormous gift shop.

My next stop was Trinity College, Dublin. For a few euro, you can get a tour guided by a loquacious Trinity College student. Both Rick Steves and the guy I talked to in the Gravity Bar highly recommended the splurge, so I went for it. Trinity

There are barrels of Guinness with my name on them!

Pushing the big red button to start the next batch (and no, I don't know why I'm making such a weird face! And sorry the photographer didn't move the camera strap out of the way of the lens.)

College was founded by Elizabeth I in 1592 to be a way to promote Protestantism among the heathen Catholic Irishmen. For centuries there were bans on Catholics (and women) attending, even though the country was predominantly Catholic (and I'd hazard a guess that it was about half female). Our guide was very witty and talked lots about the history of the college, its architecture, and its famous graduates. For example, dramatist Oscar Wilde was on the boxing team there. As for the architecture, most of it was Georgian, and the ones that aren't are supremely ugly. One was designed to have roof gardens and look like the hanging tower of Babylon, but shortly after its completion, the roofs started leaking... so the gardens were ripped out and filled with concrete. Lovely. Another building was built in honor of George Berkeley, Irish philosopher and benefactor. They hoped to induce him to leave his rare book collection by naming the building after him, but he gave it to Yale instead. Whoops. Berkeley in California is also named after him, but our Irish student guide took great delight in insisting that we Americans pronounce it wrong - they claim it's supposed to be

The Original Guinness Harp

"BARK-ly." They claim they have his correspondence with his own phonetical pronunciation of it written out. Humph. Anyway, back to the architecture. I also particularly liked the nitty-gritty details of the dorms that are an honor to live in - though they have one toilet outside for everyone in the building (or something like that). Two giant maple from Oregon grace one of the main courtyards. You have to look at the leaves to recognize them, because they are absolutely massive - due the fact that the trees are planted over the graves of vitamin-rich monks that have been slowly decomposing for centuries.

The culmination of the tour is the Trinity College Library with its crowning jewels, the Book of Kells. These are four illuminated manuscripts of the four Gospels, copied out by hand and lavishly decorated on vellum calfskin. They were produced over a period of 30 years by Irish monks in Iona, Scotland. Later they were moved to the Abbey of Kells in Ireland (thus the name) for protection from raiding Vikings. At one point they were stolen for their jeweled covers. Fortunately, the robbers had an attack of concious and couldn't destroy the actual pages... so

One of John Gilroy's original artworks

they buried them in a field, to be discovered by a farmer later. For a WHOLE lot more information (and some pictures, because I obviously couldn't photograph them), check out the Wikipedia site entry on the Book of Kells. The next stop was the envy-inspiring gigantic main library room with floor to ceiling books. In fact, they filled it floor to ceiling, then ripped off the roof, raised the ceiling, and then added more books to the new, higher ceiling. And I love how the books are organized. Alphabetically, like mine at home (cough)? By subject? By publication date? Nope. It's done by size! The large ones are near the floor, and the tiny ones are near the ceiling. Again, I wasn't allowed to take pictures, so click here. This room also holds the oldest harp in Ireland (15th century) and one of the original copies of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, read out loud by Patrick Pearse on April 24, 1916, thus kicking of a century of violent fighting. Everyone who signed it was executed.

Next I had lunch. It wasn't that thrilling.

And now I'm really tired of typing. So, once again, I will split up the