Guinness is Irish, and So is America

Two points connected tenuously by a holiday. The first comes from a post at The Economist (hat tip with more at the recently-enlivened Beeronomics), wherein the title says it all: "Why Guinness is Less Irish Than You Think." The writer can only muster a couple points to justify this Monday fodder (a blogger knows filler when he sees it): 1) Arthur Guinness was, 250 years ago, pro-British and 2) the giant corporation has many connections to London. The first one is especially lame, existing merely to give the thin post at least two points. The second one isn't much better, and the lead-in sentence is a good example why: "The beer the company has become most famous for—porter stout—was based on a London ale, a favourite of the street porters of Covent Garden and Billingsgate markets."

In terms of beer history, that's roughly like saying American-style ales don't exist because they were based on English bitters. It's true that Dublin's breweries embraced porter (along with every other brewing country in the 19th century--porter was the first international style). But they changed it. London porter was made with brown malt, a rough, smoky old product that pre-dated Daniel Wheeler's method of roasting malt black. In London, they continued making porter the same way, but Dublin dumped the brown and substituted it with black malt, splitting the line. Then, in the late 1920s or early 1930s, Guinness began using unmalted roasted barley in its grist, bringing the recipe to its modern standard. One of the reasons Guinness hopped the Irish Sea was to conquer England, which it did, eradicating porters and stouts from the island, at least for a time. The Economist gets causality backward here. (I don't care if you love or hate Guinness, but it is the most well-known brewer of a style that is uniquely Irish.)

Now, to segue awkwardly into the related topic: the strange spectacle that is the United States turning Irish for one day. Our good friend The Beer Nut regularly points out that whatever this cultural affectation that we have in the US is, it's not Irish. Fair point. I have an Irish-born friend who told me she was mystified when she arrived in America and met people who said they were Irish. She asked where they were from and they would say something like "Chicago." It would have been someone with a grandparent from Belfast.

I understand that from a European perspective this seems bizarre, and until I visited Europe, I was in total agreement. Now I think its the Americans who have things right.

History is not a tangible thing. It's the story we tell to explain ourselves. It's why Orwell's 1984 is so profound--the entire narrative hangs on his famous sentence, "He who controls the past controls the future." It's a lot easier to control that past when there are remnants of it sitting in your home town. If you happen to have, say, extant Roman or Celtic artifacts in your town, it gives form to the stories. I grew up in one of the most recently-settled parts of the US (by Europeans, anyway), and we used to treasure our hundred-year old water pumps and wagon wheels. You work with what you have.

But part of America's history is our European heritage. If your family has lived in Dublin for ten generations, you get to call yourself Irish. If your family lived for ten generations in Dublin and then moved to New York, do you lose that history? The Irishness that Americans celebrate is different than Irish Irishness, but it's no less real or authentic. Our ancestors arrived on this continent ten or a hundred or 500 years ago (and that includes most Native Americans, who at this point have histories as fragmented as my own), but that's not when their history began.

So I say put on your green shirt, go hoist a pint of Guinness (or better yet, a Porterhouse Plain, if you can find it), and offer a sláinte or three.

The beer the company has become most famous for—porter stout—was based on a London ale, a favourite of the street porters of Covent Garden and Billingsgate markets. - See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/03/economist-explains-13?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ee/whyguinnessislessirishthanyouthink#sthash.rbljngLV.dpuf

Jeff AlworthMarch 17, 2014Guinness, Holidays, Ireland, stout12 Comments