Guinness (/'g?n?s/) is an Irish dry stout that originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness at St. James's Gate, Dublin, Ireland, in 1759. It is one of the most successful alcohol brands worldwide, brewed in almost 50 countries, and available in over 120. Sales in 2011 amounted to 850,000,000 liters (190,000,000 imp gal; 220,000,000 U.S. gal). In spite of declining consumption since 2001, it is the best-selling alcoholic drink in Ireland where Guinness & Co. Brewery makes almost €2 billion worth of beer annually.

The Guinness Storehouse is a tourist attraction at St. James's Gate Brewery in Dublin, Ireland. Since opening in 2000, it has received over 20 million visitors.

Guinness's flavour derives from malted barley and roasted unmalted barley, a relatively modern development, not becoming part of the grist until the mid-20th century. For many years, a portion of aged brew was blended with freshly brewed beer to give a sharp lactic acid flavour. Although Guinness's palate still features a characteristic "tang", the company has refused to confirm whether this type of blending still occurs. The draught beer's thick, creamy head comes from mixing the beer with nitrogen and carbon dioxide.

The company moved its headquarters to London at the beginning of the Anglo-Irish Trade War in 1932. In 1997, Guinness plc merged with Grand Metropolitan to form the multinational alcoholic-drinks producer Diageo plc, based in London.

Arthur Guinness started brewing ales in 1759 at the St. James's Gate Brewery, Dublin. On 31 December 1759, he signed a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery. Ten years later, on 19 May 1769, Guinness first exported his ale: he shipped six-and-a-half barrels to Great Britain.

Arthur Guinness started selling the dark beer porter in 1778. The first Guinness beers to use the term were Single Stout and Double Stout in the 1840s. Throughout the bulk of its history, Guinness produced only three variations of a single beer type: porter or single stout, double or extra and foreign stout for export. "Stout" originally referred to a beer's strength, but eventually shifted meaning toward body and colour. Porter was also referred to as "plain", as mentioned in the famous refrain of Flann O'Brien's poem "The Workman's Friend": "A pint of plain is your only man."

Already one of the top-three British and Irish brewers, Guinness's sales soared from 350,000 barrels in 1868 to 779,000 barrels in 1876. In October 1886 Guinness became a public company and was averaging sales of 1.138 million barrels a year. This was despite the brewery's refusal to either advertise or offer its beer at a discount. Even though Guinness owned no public houses, the company was valued at £6 million and shares were 20 times oversubscribed, with share prices rising to a 60 per cent premium on the first day of trading.

The breweries pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym "Student" for techniques developed for Guinness, particularly Student's t-distribution and the even more commonly known Student's t-test.

By 1900 the brewery was operating unparalleled welfare schemes for its 5,000 employees.^[ By 1907 the welfare schemes were costing the brewery £40,000 a year, which was one-fifth of the total wages bill. The improvements were suggested and supervised by Sir John Lumsden. By 1914, Guinness was producing 2.652 million barrels of beer a year, which was more than double that of its nearest competitor Bass, and was supplying more than 10 per cent of the total UK beer market.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, employees at Guinness St. James Brewery were encouraged to join the British forces. Over 800 employees served in the war. This was made possible due to a number of measures put in place by Guinness: soldiers' families were paid half wages, and jobs were guaranteed upon their return. Of the 800 employees who fought, 103 did not return.

During the Second World War, the demand for Guinness among the British was one of the main reasons why the UK lifted commerce restrictions imposed in 1941 to force Ireland into supporting the Allied Powers.

Before 1939, if a Guinness brewer wished to marry a Catholic, his resignation was requested. According to Thomas Molloy, writing in the Irish Independent, "It had no qualms about selling drink to Catholics but it did everything it could to avoid employing them until the 1960s."

Guinness thought they brewed their last porter in 1973. In the 1970s, following declining sales, the decision was taken to make Guinness Extra Stout more "drinkable". The gravity was subsequently reduced, and the brand was relaunched in 1981. Pale malt was used for the first time, and isomerised hop extract began to be used. In 2014, two new porters were introduced: West Indies Porter and Dublin Porter.

Guinness acquired the Distillers Company in 1986. This led to a scandal and criminal trial concerning the artificial inflation of the Guinness share price during the takeover bid engineered by the chairman, Ernest Saunders. A subsequent £5.2 million success fee paid to an American lawyer and Guinness director, Tom Ward, was the subject of the case Guinness plc v Saunders, in which the House of Lords declared that the payment had been invalid.

In the 1980s, as the IRA's bombing campaign spread to London and the rest of Britain, Guinness considered scrapping the harp as its logo.

The company merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo. Due to controversy over the merger, the company was maintained as a separate entity within Diageo and has retained the rights to the product and all associated trademarks of Guinness.

The Guinness brewery in Park Royal, London, closed in 2005. The production of all Guinness sold in the UK and Ireland was moved to St. James's Gate Brewery, Dublin.

Guinness had a fleet of ships, barges and yachts. The Irish Sunday Independent newspaper reported on 17 June 2007 that Diageo intended to close the historic St James's Gate plant in Dublin and move to a greenfield site on the outskirts of the city. This news caused some controversy when it was announced.

Initially, Diageo said that talk of a move was pure speculation but in the face of mounting speculation in the wake of the Sunday Independent article, the company confirmed that it is undertaking a "significant review of its operations". This review was largely due to the efforts of the company's ongoing drive to reduce the environmental impact of brewing at the St James's Gate plant.

On 23 November 2007, an article appeared in the Evening Herald, a Dublin newspaper, stating that the Dublin City Council, in the best interests of the city of Dublin, had put forward a motion to prevent planning permission ever being granted for the development of the site, thus making it very difficult for Diageo to sell off the site for residential development.

On 9 May 2008, Diageo announced that the St James's Gate brewery will remain open and undergo renovations, but that breweries in Kilkenny and Dundalk will be closed by 2013 when a new larger brewery is opened near Dublin. The result will be a loss of roughly 250 jobs across the entire Diageo/Guinness workforce in Ireland. Two days later, the Sunday Independent again reported that Diageo chiefs had met with Tánaiste Mary Coughlan, the deputy leader of the Government of Ireland, about moving operations to Ireland from the UK to benefit from its lower corporation tax rates. Several UK firms have made the move in order to pay Ireland's 12.5 per cent rate rather than the UK's 28 per cent rate.^Diageo released a statement to the London stock exchange denying the report. Despite the merger that created Diageo plc in 1997, Guinness has retained its right to the Guinness brand and associated trademarks and thus continues to trade under the traditional Guinness name despite trading under the corporation name Diageo for a brief period in 1997.

In 2017 Diageo made their beer suitable for consumption by vegetarians and vegans by introducing a new filtration process that avoided the use of isinglass from fish bladders to filter out yeast particles.

Advertising

The Guinness harp motif is modelled on the Trinity College Harp. It was adopted in 1862 by the incumbent proprietor, Benjamin Lee Guinness. Harps have been a symbol of Ireland at least since the reign of Henry VIII. Guinness registered their harp as a trademark shortly after the passing of the Trade Marks Registration Act of 1875. It faces right instead of left, and so can be distinguished from the Irish coat of arms.^[116]

Since the 1930s, in the face of falling sales, Guinness has had a long history of marketing campaigns, from television advertisements to beer mats and posters. Before then, Guinness had almost no advertising, instead allowing word of mouth to sell the product

The most notable and recognisable series of advertisements was created by S.H. Benson's advertising, primarily drawn by the artist John Gilroy, in the 1930s and 1940s.^[117] Benson created posters that included phrases such as "Guinness for Strength", "Lovely Day for a Guinness", "Guinness Makes You Strong", "My Goodness My Guinness" (or, alternatively, "My Goodness, My Christmas, It's Guinness!"), and most famously, "Guinness is Good For You". The posters featured Gilroy's distinctive artwork and more often than not featured animals such as a kangaroo, ostrich, seal, lion and notably a toucan, which has become as much a symbol of Guinness as the harp. (An advertisement from the 1940s ran with the following jingle: "Toucans in their nests agree/Guinness is good for you/Try some today and see/What one or toucan do.") Dorothy L. Sayers and Bobby Bevan copywriters at Benson's also worked on the campaign; a biography of Sayers notes that she created a sketch of the toucan and wrote several of the adverts in question. Guinness advertising paraphernalia, notably the pastiche booklets illustrated by Ronald Ferns, attract high prices on the collectable market.

Many of the best known Guinness television commercials of the 1970s and 1980s were created by British director, Len Fulford.

In 1983, a conscious marketing decision was made to turn Guinness into a "cult" beer in the UK, amidst declining sales. The move halted the sales decline. The Guardian described the management of the brand:

"they've spent years now building a brand that's in complete opposition to cheap lagers, session drinking and crowds of young men boozing in bars. They've worked very hard to help Guinness drinkers picture themselves as twinkly-eyed, Byronic bar-room intellectuals, sitting quietly with a pint and dreaming of poetry and impossibly lovely redheads running barefoot across the peat. You have a pint or two of Guinness with a slim volume of Yeats, not eight mates and a 19-pint bender which ends in tattoos, A&E [the ED] and herpes from a hen party."

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the UK, there was a series of "darkly" humorous adverts, featuring actor Rutger Hauer, with the theme "Pure Genius", extolling its qualities in brewing and target market.

The 1994–1995 Anticipation campaign, featuring actor Joe McKinney dancing to "Guaglione" by Perez Prado while his pint settled, became a legend in Ireland and put the song to number one in the charts for several weeks. The advertisement was also popular in the UK where the song reached number two.

From 1999 to 2006, the Michael Power advertising character was the cornerstone of a major marketing campaign to promote Guinness products in Africa. The character, played by Cleveland Mitchell, was portrayed to have been born in Jamaica and raised in Great Britain. By 2003, it became one of the best-known alcohol advertising campaigns in Africa. Jo Foster of the BBC referred to Power as "Africa's very own 'James Bond'".

In 2000, Guinness's 1999 advertisement "Surfer" was named the best television commercial of all time, in a UK poll conducted by The Sunday Times and Channel 4. This advertisement is inspired by the famous 1980s Guinness TV and cinema ad, "Big Wave", centred on a surfer riding a wave while a bikini-clad sunbather takes photographs. The 1980s advertisement not only remained a popular iconic image in its own right; it also entered the Irish cultural memory through inspiring a well-known line in Christy Moore's song "Delirium Tremens" (1985). "Surfer" was produced by the advertising agency Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO; the advertisement can be downloaded from their website.

GUINNess won the 2001 Clio Award as the Advertiser of the Year, citing the work of five separate ad agencies around the world.

In 2002, Guinness applied the Michael Power formula to Asia with the character Adam King. The campaign featured such tag lines as: "Everyday someone, somewhere achieves something new. Sometimes on a grand, dramatic scale. Sometimes on a more personal scale." As of 2004, Guinness ranked among the top three beer labels in Singapore and Malaysia, with a 20 per cent market share across Southeast Asia. Malaysia was the brand's third-largest market in the region and the sixth largest market worldwide.

In 2003, the Guinness TV campaign featuring Tom Crean won the gold Shark Award at the International Advertising Festival of Ireland, while in 2005 their Irish Christmas campaign won a silver Shark. This TV ad has been run every Christmas since its debut in December 2004 and features pictures of snow falling in places around Ireland, evoking the James Joyce story "The Dead", finishing at St. James's Gate Brewery with the line: "Even at the home of the black stuff they dream of a white one".

Their UK commercial "noitulovE", first broadcast in October 2005, was the most-awarded commercial worldwide in 2006. In it, three men drink a pint of Guinness, then begin to both walk and evolve backward. Their "reverse evolution" passes through an ancient Homo sapiens, a monkey, a flying lemur, a pangolin, an ichthyosaur, and a velociraptor, until finally settling on a mud skipper drinking dirty water, which then expresses its disgust at the taste of the stuff, followed by the line: "Good Things Come To Those Who Wait". This was later modified to have different endings to advertise Guinness Extra Cold, often shown as "break bumpers" at the beginning and end of commercial breaks. The second endings show either the Homo sapiens being suddenly frozen in a block of ice, the ichthyosaurs being frozen while swimming, or the pool of muddy water freezing over as the mudskipper takes a sip, freezing his tongue to the surface.

Two further advertisements in 2006 and early 2007, "Hands" and "St. Patrick's Hands", were created by animator Michael Schlingmann for Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. They feature a pair of hands, animated in stop motion under a rostrum camera. "Hands" focuses on the 119.53 seconds it takes to pour a pint, and "St. Patrick's Hands is a spoof of Riverdance, with the animated hands doing the dancing.

In 2006, Diageo, owner of the Guinness brand, replaced the Michael Power campaign with the "Guinness Greatness" campaign, which they claim emphasises the "drop of greatness" in everyone, in contrast to the high-tension heroics of the Power character.

Guinness' 2007 advertisement, directed by Nicolai Fuglsig and filmed in Argentina, is entitled "Tipping Point". It involves a large-scale domino chain reaction and, with a budget of £10 million, was the most expensive advertisement by the company at that point.

The 2000s also saw a series of television advertisements, entitled "Brilliant!" in which two crudely animated Guinness brewmasters would discuss the beer, particularly the ability to drink it straight from the bottle. The two would almost always react to their discoveries with the catchphrase "Brilliant!", hence the campaign's title.

In 2009, the "To Arthur" advertisement, which started with two friends realising the company's long history, hail each other by lifting up their glasses and saying: "to Arthur!". The hailing slowing spread throughout the bar to the streets outside, and finally around the world. The advertisement ends with the voiceover: "Join the worldwide celebration, of a man named Arthur".

This gave rise to the event now known as Arthur's Day. "Arthur's Day is a series of events and celebrations taking place around the world to celebrate the life and legacy of Arthur Guinness and the much-loved Guinness beer which Arthur brought to the world."

Starting in 2011, the Guinness brand issued a series of Ireland-wide advertisements featuring everyday Irish people as part of their "Guinness is Good For Us" campaign referencing the iconic "Guinness is Good For You" campaign of the 1920s to 1960s.

Through much of the 20th century, doctors thought Guinness had medicinal properties. Even until the 1950s mothers in Irish hospitals were given Guinness after giving birth because of the high iron content.

So it's no surprise that the Benson agency's simple tagline "Guinness is good for you" was a hit with consumers when it was introduced in 1929. The slogan remained the foundation of the brand for the next 40 years, until the advertising environment became a little more regulated.

John Gilroy, an art director at Benson, started working on the Guinness account in 1930 and illustrated  almost all of Guinness' advertisements for the next thirty years.

This "Girder" poster was the most popular in the "Guinness for Strength" campaign that depicted men performing feats of ridiculous strength with the help of Guinness.

ARTIST/ILLUSTRATOR:  John Gilroy, an art director at Benson, started working on the Guinness account in 1930 and illustrated almost all of Guinness' advertisements for the next thirty years.Mar 12, 2012