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We arrived at the Guinness Brewery - actually, the tour bit is called something attractive to marketing types, like The Storehouse - and then queued in the wind for 10 minutes before we were allowed out of the searing air and into the shelter of the building. The main atrium is where you can buy your tickets which come with a glass pebble which contains an electronic tag (more on this later) and a drop of genuine Guinness. At worst this is a cute memento of the trip - at best it's a paperweight. In no way is it likely to be used for the one purpose it advises you to avoid - as a source of a small drop of Guinness for drinking. Do not open this up and drink the Guinness. Sure, like you're going to be so thirsty that it's worth smashing a holiday memento up in order to extract virtually no amount of stale unrefrigerated alcohol!
Anyway...
For some reason we decided to put off the actually touring in favour of getting some food in a the wee cafe they had a few floors up. This meant temporarily bypassing the tour path, which has you ascend the building, through a series of exhibits, until you reach the zenith of both the building and your tour - the Gravity Bar. Anyway, we found a small eatery where we found the food to be very good, but the service to be somewhat lacking. No idea why. This may be something of a cultural difference between our expectations of rapid service and the somewhat less rushed nature of our Irish cousins. I had a cappuccino with my food and Caroline had a pot of tea (is that really interesting 2 years later?) and I was led to theorise about a Cappu-tea-no, a special Cappuccino-like tea drink in which the tea was mixed with frothed milk... and perhaps was even brewed by passing hot water through it at high pressure (oooh!).
Back on the tour we found that a comment from one friend - "the exhibits get more sparse as you get further along the tour" - was absolutely right. We eagerly passed through displays concerning the ingredients (er, water and barley - maybe yeast - I dunno), the transport, storage, Arthur Guinness himself (who copied the drink from a popular English brew), and advertising. Then we got ourselves into the Gravity bar where our special glass souvenir, with its electronic tag, became a clever token for getting one free pint of Guinness. For free. That's free... well, included in the ticket price. Unlike the water in the government buildings, which wasn't included at all. Also unlike the water in the government buildings which was greedily quaffed by the batty lady who stole it, the Guinness in the Gravity bar appeared to be something that was more sampled than actually drunk. Many many half full or even virtually untouched glasses of the black stuff were left behind by the visitors. I wonder if they have ever worked out the statistics and found out whether they'd be better off giving away up to three half pints, rather than over-facing people with pints of a drink that a lot of people cannot stomach.
We enjoyed our Guinness and then got ourselves back to the hotel. We'd achieved a lifelong ambition - to find out stuff about Guinness. Ok, that's not true, but we'd had fun. The fact that I can still remember what the place looked like, and even have some feeling of where the water comes from - it's not river water, oh no... means that it was worth the few Euros I spent on the ticket. I still have the paperweight/token/emergency drop of Guinness.
18. An evening's entertainment
19 May 2004
Ashley Frieze