“Y’know, the Guinness two-part pour is actually just a marketing ploy…”
That sound you can hear is the temporal vein on the side of my head bulging clean through my cranium and exploding in a cacophony of claret across the bar of Mulligan’s of Deansgate. It takes every fibre of my being to not unleash a, mostly involuntary, primal scream that sounds like Lulu trying to knock out the opening line of ‘Shout’ after eight lagers and a wrap of whizz.
It was torture enough that I had to read this exact sentence, almost verbatim, on Twitter earlier that week, but now I was having it parroted in my vicinity by a Home Counties accented rugger bugger, whose other topics of unbearably loud conversation involved an upcoming golfing holiday, which pubs made for the best Six Nations viewing and an absurd, unprompted rant about never eating sushi outside of Japan or Los Angeles. If a boa constrictor had slithered into the pub and slowly devoured me alive it would have actually lifted my mood.
While my 45 minutes in some braindead blowhard’s orbit is the sort of situation that anyone could unfortunately find themselves in during any visit to the pub, this particular instance, and the social media-level Guinness expertise that commenced it all, felt emblematic of a societal issue that has been allowed to spiral horrendously out of control over the past few years.
We need to talk about Guinness. Or, rather, we all need to immediately stop fucking talking about it.
Now, I love Guinness. I’m not here to offer some needy hot take like a contrarian edgelord who spends the majority of their waking hours commenting ‘mid’ on Twitter and Instagram. I think it’s brilliant. Two years ago I spent an entire day putting 12 pints of it into my system as part of a St. Patrick’s Day Guide for EATMCR. A perfectly poured pint of Guinness is a truly wonderful experience to enjoy in the tranquility of a nearly abandoned pub or with a few mates in a packed back room on a Friday evening.
But the discourse around Guinness that has spread, pandemic-like, through online communities and into almost every boozer you are likely to step foot in nowadays? It simply has to be stopped.
Snapping a picture of your pint, especially against the backdrop of an old mahogany bar or a Victorian copper topped pub table, is an irresistible urge. I get it. We all get it. The Guinness aesthetic lends itself very generously to social media engagement. You see it and immediately wish it was you on the other end of that camera, about to bring that sumptous, stouty sod to your lips.
But now what comes with that pint is the comments. The takes that no one asked for. The inane rituals of consuming the pint and the reviews and the ceaseless fucking nonsense-soaked knowledge that half the world appears to have amassed about Guinness that could not be any less fucking boring if it tried.
No, I do not want to split the G, or the harp for that matter. I could not be less arsed about engaging in some performative bollocks of a ‘challenge’. I have no intention of necking almost the entire first half of my pint in one swig (apart from maybe just after 5pm on a Friday, admittedly). I just want to enjoy my Guinness in peace without it descending into the sort of forced fun that was left in Freshers Week for a reason. You’re just left with less of your pint than you probably should be after one sip. Good though that you’re now purposefully not enjoying that pint you paid north of six quid for, isn’t it?
There is also simply no need to be going red in the face explaining why the poor, overworked, knackered fucks behind the bar don’t know how to properly pour that pint that actually tastes absolutely fine, just because the ‘dome’ is slightly askew or its dimensions don’t accurately align with those you and some very cool people on reddit have decided are the consummate crowning for a pint of the black stuff.
Yes, we would all love to live in a world where every pint of lager or IPA or Guinness or whatever it is you’re into is undeniably gorgeous to the point where you’re wondering if the almost £7 you’ve paid for it is actually enough. But if it’s simply OK, how outraged can you legitimately be? Especially when you’ve been drinking Guinness for all of 18 months when you realised pictures and videos of it could gain you an extra few likes and comments on Instagram.
It’s a drink. Not a personality.
I appreciate this is all sounding very ‘old man shouts at cloud’. But the issue is not people discovering Guinness, enjoying it and (responsibly) drinking lots of it. No one should care if somebody has been drinking it for a week or their entire adult life. The issue is when the drink becomes nothing more than a prop for likes and shares. When it is reduced to very loud conversation fodder for the most boring people in the world, who would gladly stop drinking it tomorrow if they were informed that all future social media content featuring it would be hidden by one of Mark Zuckerberg’s pointless new algorithms. Then it becomes less of a drink and more of a scene. A scene which is actively hampering the enjoyment of ordering a pint of Guinness in the first place.
The content creator and influencer-led race to the bottom over who can appear to be the most knowledgeable internet personality when it comes to Guinness has unfurled a series of ‘Top 10 places to drink Guinness in…’ videos, with historic pubs rebranded as ‘hidden gems’ to make the presenter appear more authentic in their approach, as they clamour for that free Nitrosurge or Microdraught device in the post for a job well done. It’s a culture for those without it to latch onto. For people who’s favourite cuisine is ‘street food’. For the middle and upper-middle class ‘influencers’ who utilise council estates, greasy spoons and smashed up bus stops for their ‘grittier’ and ‘edgier’ shoots to artificially construct a more ‘real’ and ‘down-to-earth’ appeal. That’s them, who desperately wanted England to pip Ireland to the Six Nations title on Saturday, God Save The King and all, before donning a Guinness top hat on St.Patrick’s Day, yesterday.
We need to normalise enjoying things without clamouring for attention. Over the decades, Guinness has delivered us some exquisite branding, marketing (that ‘Surfer’, ‘Dreamer’ and ‘Swimblack’ trio from Jonathan Glazer still has me in a chokehold to this day) and merchandise that is hard to resist. Of course I want the vintage green stout label glasses and yeah, go on then, let’s have an old Toucan dad hat while we’re at it. But venture into ‘Joey Tribbiani is pretending he owns a Porsche by dressing head-to-toe in official Porsche merchandise’ territory just to falsely prove to people you know more about a drink than they do? Absolutely fucking not. Wind it all the way in.
Two years ago, while piecing together the St.Patrick’s Day Guinness Guide for EATMCR, we fielded recommendations from followers about where they most enjoyed a pint of Ireland’s greatest export since Roy Keane. One reply, from the always reliable Bundobust Brewery’s account, simply exclaimed “The best Guinness is in your head”, which is pretty unbeatable advice really, isn’t it? It isn’t some ostentatious display from self-proclaimed experts. It’s a call to calm down and enjoy a pint in somewhere you feel comfortable. And not to give a fuck about how many pours it took to achieve your pint.
Cheers! You had me at "a Home Counties accented rugger bugger..."