I know it may be a cliché for an Irish landlord, but I always look forward to St Patrick’s Day. Smiling faces, music and a perfect pint of Guinness are among my favourite things. Today all three will fill the Guinea Grill, the pub I run for Young’s.
The celebrations mean an early start for the pub: friends and customers will start arriving from 10am. There’ll be oysters, and the possibility of a sing-song around lunch time is quite high. But most people will come for a Guinness. We sell about 2,700 pints a week these days.
Guinness in England has improved through the ages — until 2005 it was pasteurised because English pubs required a much longer shelf life, because the stuff wasn’t that popular. That year, the Guinness brewery in Park Royal shut too, and now all of the draught Guinness in the UK is brewed in Dublin and exported across the Irish sea, so there’s less excuse for pubs now to be serving Shit London Guinness. However, the technical expertise and the amount of work that goes into ensuring that we provide a perfect pint every single time is vast. There are about 12 different golden rules, of which any broken would lead to a substandard pint of beer.
I think we do ours rather well; a couple of weeks back we were given the seal of approval by Irish pint influencer — yes, it’s a thing — the Guinness Guru, who declared ours the best in central London. It doesn’t happen by accident. The beer has to be really well cared for, and the cleanliness and technical consistency needs to be checked all the time.
In Ireland we are fastidious about how it is poured, even though — debatable point here — it doesn’t actually affect how it tastes. But pouring correctly makes sure that the beer has the perfect head: we use the two-part pour into a super-clean glass and that ensures that we have a lovely dome on the top. You know, so you can get those little bubbles as a moustache on your top lip.
Each pint produces 300 million bubbles and we work really hard to make sure all of them are exactly the same size, to form a perfect creamy floating head. To create our minuscule bubbles, we pump the beer under very high pressure with a high percentage of nitrogen through a disc with tiny holes in; this yields more plentiful bubbles. These take longer to settle though, so sometimes you might have to wait two or three minutes before the second pour.
Our pints are bright and clear of yeast. Hold your pint up to the light, look through the bottom of the glass and see a bright ruby red glint — there should be no cloudiness in that. If there is, the flavour isn’t going to be there. The other thing is, on their trips to England, Irish lads often remark on how chilly the pints are over here. The Guinea’s are served at 4.4°, slightly colder than in Dublin but more temperate than many of our competitors in London.
A true Guinness fan will be fastidious about the glass it is served from. I have been horrified to receive a pint in a normal pint glass. That’s just perverted, even worse a branded lager glass. We serve it in the traditional 90s style Guinness-branded Dublin tulip glass. They’re rare in London (I can’t reveal our source).
You may hear some fanatics talking about the “schtick”. That’s the white foamy pattern left in the glass once you’ve drained it. A good head will always stick to a good, clean glass If the pint is drunk shortly after pouring, but a Guinness head begins to degrade immediately so good schtick depends on drinking at a pace.
So next time you’re out, don’t have a fizzy lager, have a Guinness. It’s an egalitarian drink. Everybody enjoys it. It’s a badge of someone who cares about what they consume and has a good palate. It’s as healthy as a slice of bread. So have a few, maybe even in my pub.
