The Brewhouse Series arrives
Hmm ... didn't realise that the Guinness Brewhouse Series variants had become available outside Dublin until I came across the latest one in The Hideout at the weekend.
The 'North Star' brew is the first to be made available outside Dublin, 'mine host' at The Hideout, Martin Myles, tells me.
There are, the Diary understands, some 36 of these recipes available, so the option of something more than your 'standard' Guinness is going to be around for a long time.
Guinness as a drink has suffered somewhat over the years against the variety of lager beers which have become available in the country. Though the owners of the brand have protected themselves by brewing much of the competition beers themselves.
Your Editor is old enough to appreciate the qualities of a dark beer such as Guinness, and, of course, has an historical connection with both the drinks business and The Hideout itself.
I like this version. As Martin says, it doesn't have the 'killer taste' that is a Guinness characteristic against other dark beers. But for a Sunday morning it tastes real good, being smooth and with just a hint of the 'burnt' taste of the 'real' brew.
Of course this is really a marketing exercise to encourage a bit of adventurism in beer drinking among younger customers. I remember when they tried this first, producing a 'Guinness Light' in 1979 that totally fell out of the stratosphere.
Which is an apt metaphor, because the advertising campaign used a space programme rocket 'liftoff' to promote it. The tagline for the ad was 'They Said it Couldn't be Done'. And it couldn't.
I travel a lot, and find that there's a much greater variety of beers in many of the countries than we have here. Indeed, I'm in favour of the move towards micro-brewing, where a pub produces its own beer ... but I also realise this isn't an option outside major urban areas.
Guinness is putting an expensive pub-level campaign into this initiative. Now that it has come to Kilcullen, I'll be monitoring it directly.
Somebody has to ...
Brian Byrne.
