Is this the curse of popularity? Guinness — once so in decline that even an Obama press op couldn’t boost sales — has rallied as boxers sometimes do on the canvas. The brand has spent the last decade coming out swinging; now one in every 10 pints poured in a London pub is said to be the black stuff. And what’s the trick when you’re in demand? Diversify, sell the fans something else. It’s an old ruse, it’s business.
It is, I’d wager, exactly what Dublin’s most famous family are doing now with their new release, Guinness Cold Brew Coffee Beer. It is, they say, “the ideal drink for Guinness fans, as well as those who may not previously have considered enjoying a pint of the black stuff.” They’re ambitious, then, splitting their target market between those into Guinness (me, maybe you) and those not (some of your mates, children, animals et cetera). A niche product this is not.
Neither is it any good. The new cans are presently being inflicted only on Tesco shoppers, but “further supermarkets and off-licences” are threatened in the future. Pubs remain the safest refuge. The brewery says it has mixed up cold brew coffee with normal Guinness (the caffeine quotient is negligible — about the same as an instant decaf coffee), some other bits and bobs (“additional roasted barley flavours”), and practiced some kind of dark alchemy in the name of “delicate notes of delicious coffee, chocolate and caramel.” The can gushes further: the promise is “a delicious yet refreshingly sweet taste sensation.”
Sensation is right: the one I experienced was abject disgust. Post a minor explosion of sorts on opening the can, the stuff pours impressively — the head has the requisite creaminess — and there is strong whiff of coffee drifting upwards off the beer, which later will congeal into a poisonous sort of cloud. And to taste? The flavour is singularly despicable, a strangely sugary horrorshow with, bizarrely, notes of cherry teacakes, the marshmallow ones. The coffee is there, but it’s the kind of coffee one images has sat stale in the glass jar of a disused American filter coffee machine, the kind you’d find in an abandoned roadside diner. It is abrasively synthetic; there’s too much that’s metallic, that’s bloody, which is to say it tastes like taking a punch in the mouth. I certainly felt attacked.
The brewer has form with this sort of messing about. In the late Seventies, again hoping to grasp a market share of those who wouldn’t normally drink the stuff, the brewer launched Guinness Light. It was not a success; decades later the Irish Times would dub it “the HMS Titanic of stout products". Years later came Guinness mid-strength, now all but forgotten. Is there a lesson here? Stick to what you’re good at?
Guinness say those “coffee, chocolate and caramel” flavours will last “from the first sip to the last”. Anyone sensible will make that first and last sip one and the same; to suffer more would be depressing, to battle an entire can — torturous.
Some might recall that last year, after the successful launch of the popular, alcohol-free Guinness 0.0, St James’s Gate had to recall the cans after just a fortnight, as the product was briefly “unsafe so consume”. They should do the same again, on exactly the same grounds. I have spat out river water I preferred.
