The Making of a Classic: Guinness Draught

During this time of pandemic, when we have more time for reading than sampling new beers, I thought it would be a great time to explore some classic, much imitated (but rarely equaled) beers and what makes them tick. Click here to see other beers in the series.

Listen to this article:

Guinness is treated as a beer as often as a brewery, as if it is a single, immutable force. Like Pacifico or Heineken, naming the company names the beer. For Guinness this has never been true, though, even in the attenuated American market of decades past. The brewery makes stronger, bottled Extra Stout (5.6% ABV), available in the US for decades, and its legendary (though changed) Foreign Extra Stout (7.5%), to name two brands that date back well over a century. When Americans—and most drinkers—think of Guinness, they call to mind the 4.2% pints with the mousse-like head served at Irish pubs across the land.

Guinness Draft (or “draught,” as the brewery prefers) is an enduring favorite, but it’s not an ancient one—at least by the brewery’s own standards. Dating only to the late 1950s, it was invented to replace a crazy, truly ancient bespoke draft beer that publicans blended at the tap. It was a modern update that changed not just the way the beer was dispensed, but the beer itself. In the process, it also created what we now call Irish stout, a beer that until then meant something entirely different. The story of Guinness Draught is one of technology, innovation, industry, and cultural transformation.

Full Disclosure. While Guinness has been a wonderful partner ☝️ of this blog for years, its selection as a classic beer is one you strongly endorse.

Bottled and Aged in Vats

The Guinness Brewery is old enough that it predates stout’s Irish arrival. The earliest brewing logs, dating to the late 1790s, describe “ale,” which at the time referred to a lighter, less hoppy beer. Porter arrived first on boats, from London, and Guinness began experimenting with the style in the early 1800s. The porter of that era, strong, brown, barrel-aged and vinous, was radically different from the Guinness Draught we know today. Made with rough, smoky brown malt, it started as an acrid muddy-looking ale that couldn’t have been very palatable. When breweries let it age in oak vats, however, the microbes resident in the cracks and apertures of the staves—they would one day be known as “British yeast,” Brettanomyces—slowly transformed it into elegant, refined beer locals likened to sherry and amontillado. It was so well-regarded it went out in the bellies of ships bound for foreign ports, and one of the first places it arrived was Dublin (then part of the United Kingdom).

Guinness would eventually erect an empire on the popularity of these porters. Within a few decades, however, they began making them differently than London breweries, dialing back the brown malt and using a newly-invented drum-roasted black malt. Over the next century and more, the beer continued to evolve, later using a change in law to include unmalted barley—now a signature of the style—in the grist. (Ireland was still controlled by the UK and subject to its laws, recall.) One thing didn’t change; from the early 19th century until well into the twentieth, the brewery aged its strong stouts and porters in vathouses that now surround the brewery in a vast campus of saw-toothed, gabled alleys.

During this long period, Guinness was mainly a bottled product. Guinness’s heft and complexity didn’t lend itself to draft service, even in an age when beers were much stronger. In one of those very bizarre beer stories that recalls the incongruities of American distribution, Guinness sent their beer to separate companies for bottling. The bottlers put their names on their labels, either excluding Guinness’s or just highlighting their own, yet the quality of the product ensured that it, like the London porters that inspired Dublin’s brewers, would be sent out to the far corners of the globe.

The High and Low

That doesn’t mean the gentlemen at St James Gate ignored their local pubs. To fast forward to the development of draft in the 1950s, Guinness had about three-quarters of Dublin’s market, and half that was sold on draft—but delivering a pint was an ordeal. Or perhaps we could say it was a unique kind of “craft” endeavor. Over time, beginning as early as the late 1800s, publicans had taken to blending the beer on the spot to harness certain advantages of the vat-aged stuff along with fresh, lively beer. The lively stuff (the “high”) was actually massively carbonated and exited the tap as pure foam. Publicans drew it into pitchers or glasses and allowed it to settle. Once the head had come down to a somewhat reasonable level, they topped it off with still, fully aged beer (the “low.”) The process took a minute or more, and involved a ritual pub-goers watched as they drank. Despite the introduction of Draught, it survived through the 1960s in some pubs—and fortunately, video of the whole process survives. The 1973 video below eulogized the death of Irish porter—by then totally displaced by stout—and the BBC presents the process beautifully. (Guinness, archivist Eibhlin Colgan tells me, used the high and low mostly with Extra Stout in the 20th century, though it too made a porter until after the wars.)

Guinness already had a large share of the Irish market, so draft beer wasn’t an issue locally. The problem was Britain, where the company had just a 5% share in the 1950s. Draft (or cask, really) was king there, and Guinness had a new London brewery set to provide the market with all the beer it could drink, if only they could solve the “draught problem.” English publicans hadn’t been pouring the high and low for decades as Dubliners had, and they weren’t about to start. Somehow, Guinness had to figure out how to combine the high and low into kegs or casks before sending them out to pubs.

Even before the Park Royal brewery broke ground in London, Guinness introduced a patent on one solution—a keg with its own separate CO2 chamber, presumably to supercharge the carbonation the way the high did in Dublin pubs. It didn’t really work, though, and didn’t go anywhere. The decades rolled along and Guinness made no progress on the question. Fortunately, in 1951 they hired a mathematician named Michael Ash. It would take him the better part of another decade, but eventually he solved the problem—and created an entirely new beer along the way.

Michael’s Ash Can

Ash was born in Calcutta in 1927, and went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a “triple first” in his studies as the top scholar. He came in with a cohort of other smart people who didn’t have a background in brewing; this was part of a new initiative at Guinness to encourage innovation. Ash was the first hire they made.

Once he’d been trained as a brewer in Dublin, he returned to the Park Royal. He worked on the riddle of how to replace this system for years. Very early on, he saw nitrogen as a possible solution. It was “such an obvious gas,” he told me shortly before his death in 2016. “It’s completely inert and it’s three-quarters of what we breathe. It was perfect for this purpose.” The trick wasn’t selecting the right gas, though; it was designing a keg that would work with it. Inside Guinness, Ash’s quest was regarded as quixotic, and other brewers chided it as “daft Guinness” and the “Ash Can.”

Eventually, working with a keg designer, he did figure it out. “There were two parts,” he explained. “One part where we had to have a reducing valve, and one part for the two gases, nitrogen and CO2, high pressure, reducing valve, low pressure, flood the beer. When we drew off the beer, the gas would come through the reducing valve giving you a constant pressure.” The keg went through two designs before Guinness started sending it out to pubs, rushing at the end to get the project launched by 1959—the brewery’s 200th anniversary.

Had he been trained as a brewer, Ash might have approached it differently. But for the mathematician it became an intellectual riddle. Guinness fiddled at the margins with the “draft problem” from 1932 until Ash got there, and then he set about solving it the way he was trained at Cambridge. Yet because he was not a brewer, he wasn’t as concerned with how the beer might change in order to go into mass production for draft.

The Gravity Bar resembles the head of a beer.

Brewhouse #4 (that is, the fourth in the brewery’s history)

Dublin’s high-and-low draft beer was not built for modernity in any real way—but certainly not for a brewery that wanted to sell millions of barrels of draft beer in Irish pubs around the world. In order to create a dispense system that created a creamy pint, Guinness had to forgo blending—and they did it by ditching the old, barrel-aged still portion of the two “threads.” Guinness is a famously secretive brewery and how they did this and when—whether it was phased in or started entirely with the Ash cans—I have never been able to learn. In any case, Draught transformed with the introduction of nitrogen dispense and never looked back.

Irish Stout Reborn

The date on the bottle says 1759, and drinkers are quick to assume that the “Irish stout” they know has been around a long, long time. Few styles have such a narrow window for expression or such specific guidelines with respect to process, ingredient, and serving. The Guinness Brewery has always been one of the most-visited sites in Ireland, and all the ritual and mystery surrounding the beer seems as ancient as St Patrick’s Cathedral.

Of course, it was all born in the fifties and sixties. In fact, all those rituals of serving were holdovers from the old high-and-low process. The initial partial pour and the wait for the beer to settle recalls dispensing a glass of foam; the top-off echoes adding the still beer. Guinness understood the power of ritual and myth, and encouraged them to swirl around this new beer. They knew pubgoers loved the theater of this old pour, the anticipation. Because preparing a beer this way fell to the skill of the publican, the quality of each pour varied. Customers prized the perfect pint, and that notion is something Guinness has highlighted for decades.

In the 62 years since it debuted, Guinness Draught quit cosplaying a classic and became one. Although the beer is different than it once was, and because it is so common, we sometimes forget how distinctive it actually is—and how important it was in those long decades when insipid lagers killed off most ales. That roasted barley offers a blast of coffee-like bitterness, and something—apparently not hops—adds a layer of herbal bite. The yeast is more difficult to identify amid those flavors, but it’s there if you look. And of course the nitrogen is one of the most important and distinctive developments in beer history. For the past several decades, through incredible changes in the brewing industry and culture itself, Guinness has protected Draught like the Crown Jewels.

Even though the beer didn’t change, the people around it did. In the sixties and seventies, particularly outside Ireland, Guinness became an ambassador for its home country and a cultural artifact. In the 1980s and 1990s it stood as one of the few extant examples of an authentic, characterful ale. In the aughts it slid from beer geek favor, replaced by the more intense ales it helped inspire. And now? Guinness finds itself back on-trend. It was “low-cal” before that was cool, and is ideal for sessions, a beer that defined “lifestyle” eons before that concept existed. But it’s also a mighty mite of flavor in its flyweight class, something other breweries have struggled to accomplish. And it has earned the respect of fans, even the gimlet-eyed, unromantic beer geeks who inhabit Twitter.

Guinness makes a few stouts and now, as it contends with craft beer, most other styles as well. Yet through it all, “Guinness” has mostly meant Draught. It’s one of the few beers even non-beer people know, and a testament to how to build a flagship that lasts. There are few certainties in the world, but I expect it to be around another 62 years—at least.

Making of a ClassicJeff AlworthMarch 31, 20214 Comments