 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Alcoholic beverages |
| Founded | 1759; 267 years ago (1759), inSt. James's Gate,Dublin, Ireland |
| Founder | Arthur Guinness |
| Headquarters | , Ireland |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Products | Guinness Draught |
Production output | 82.9 million hectolitres 50.7 million barrels |
| Parent | Diageo (1997–present) |
| Website | www |
St. James's Gate Brewery is abrewery founded in 1759 inDublin, Ireland, byArthur Guinness. The company is now a part ofDiageo, a company formed from the merger of Guinness andGrand Metropolitan in 1997. The main product of the brewery isDraught Guinness.
Originally leased in 1759 to Arthur Guinness at £45 per year for 9,000 years, theSt. James's Gate area has been the home of Guinness ever since. It became the largest brewery in Ireland in 1838, and the largest in the world by 1886, with an annual output of 1.2 million barrels.[1] Although no longer the largest brewery in the world, it remains as the largest brewer ofstout. The company has since bought out the originally leased property,[2] and during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the brewery owned most of the buildings in the surrounding area, including many streets of housing for brewery employees, and offices associated with the brewery. The brewery had its own power plant.[3][4]
There is an attached exhibition on the 250-year-old history of Guinness, called theGuinness Storehouse.
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Arthur Guinness started brewing ales inLeixlip, County Kildare, and then from 1759 at the St. James's Gate Brewery inDublin. On 31 December, he signed a 9,000-year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery.[6][7] However, the lease is no longer in effect because the brewery property has been bought out when it expanded beyond the original 4-acre site.[2]
Ten years after establishment, on 19 May 1769, Guinness exported his beer (he had ceased ale brewing by then) for the first time, when six and a half barrels were shipped to England. The business expanded by adoptingsteam power and further exporting to the English market. On the death ofSir Benjamin Lee Guinness in 1868, the business was worth over £1 million, and the brewery site had grown from about 1 acre to over 64 acres. In 1886, his sonEdward sold 65 per cent of the business by apublic offering on theLondon Stock Exchange for £6 million.
London brewersWhitbread andBarclay Perkins accounted for 80% of theporter sold in Dublin in the 1770s, but by the early 1890s, Guinness was exporting to markets across theBritish Empire and beyond; from the Caribbean to West Africa to Australia. The market reach of Guinness stout was fuelled by the capital raised in 1886. Theflotation allowed Guinness to outpace rivals like Whitbread - which would bottle Guinness stout from 1904 - ensuring its dominance well into the 20th century.[8][9]
The company pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statisticianWilliam Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym "Student" for techniques developed for Guinness, particularlyStudent's t-distribution and the even more commonly knownStudent's t-test.[10]
Because of theIrish Free State's "Control of Manufactures Act" in 1932, the company moved its headquarters to London later that year.[11] Guinness brewed its lastporter in 1974.
In 1983, a non-family chief executiveErnest Saunders was appointed and arranged thereverse takeover of the leadingScotch whisky producerDistillers in 1986. Saunders was then asked to resign following revelations that the Guinness stock price had been illegally manipulated (seeGuinness share-trading fraud).
In 1986,Guinness PLC was in the midst of a bidding war for the much larger Distillers Company. In the closing stages, Guinness' stock rose 25 per cent — which was unusual, since the stock of the acquiring company usually falls in a takeover situation. Guinnesspaid several people and institutions, most notably AmericanarbitrageurIvan Boesky, about US$38 million to buy US$300 million worth of Guinness stock. The effect was to increase the value of its offer for Distillers, whose management favoured merging with Guinness.
In the course of the investigation, it emerged thatBank Leu was involved in half of the purchases. Two of Guinness' directors signed under-the-table agreements in which Bank Leu subsidiaries inZug andLucerne bought 41 million Guinness shares. Guinness secretly promised to redeem the shares at cost, including commissions. To fulfil its end of the bargain, Guinness deposited $76 million with Bank Leu'sLuxembourg subsidiary.
As Distillers was worth more than Guinness plc, theGuinness family shareholding in the merged company went below 10 per cent, and today no member of the family sits on the board. Guinness acquired the Distillers Company in 1986.[12]
The company merged withGrand Metropolitan in 1997, to formDiageo plc, capitalised in 2006 at about 40 billion euros.[13]
The Guinness brewery inPark Royal, London, closed in 2005.[14] A major expansion project, undertaken bySisk Group at a cost of €153 million was completed at the St. James's Gate Brewery in Dublin in June 2013.[15] This allowed the production of all Guinness sold in the United Kingdom and theRepublic of Ireland to be switched to the St. James's Gate Brewery.[16]
In 2018, Guinness opened its first brewery in 64 years in the United States, inBaltimore, Maryland.[17] The last Guinness brewery in the US closed in 1954.[18] This US location focuses on "special news" and Guinness Blonde American Lager, but not the classic stout, which is still imported from Dublin.[19][20]
According to a Diageo publication in 2019, the St James' Gate brewery was then operating at over 90 percent capacity and one of the "most profitable breweries in the world".[21]
The main product isGuinness Draught, a 4.2%ABVdry stout that is one of the most successful beer brands worldwide. For many years a portion of the drink was aged to give a sharp lactic flavour, although Guinness has refused to confirm whether this still occurs. The thick creamy head is the result of the beer being mixed withnitrogen when being poured. It is popular with Irish people both in Ireland and abroad and is the best-selling alcoholic drink in Ireland[22][23] where Guinness & Co. makes almost €2 billion annually. The brewery also producesGuinness Original, a 4.3% ABV version of the Draught, without the nitrogen;[24] Kaliber, a low alcoholpale lager; Guinness Bitter, a 4.4%bitter sold in a can with awidget; and the 7.5%Guinness Foreign Extra Stout.
Guinness stout is available in a number of variants and strengths, which include:
In 2005, Guinness announced the Brewhouse Series, a limited-edition collection of draught stouts available for roughly six months each. There were three beers in the series:
Despite an announcement in June 2007 that the fourth Brewhouse stout would be launched in October that year,[35] no new beer appeared and, at the end of 2007, the Brewhouse series appeared to have been quietly cancelled.
Withdrawn Guinness variants include Guinness's Brite Lager, Guinness's Brite Ale, Guinness Light, Guinness XXX Extra Strong Stout, Guinness Cream Stout, Guinness Gold, Guinness Pilsner, Guinness Breó (a slightly citrusy wheat beer), Guinness Shandy, and Guinness Special Light. Breó (meaning 'glow' in ancient Irish) was a wheat beer; it cost around 5 million Irish pounds to develop.
For a short time in the late 1990s, Guinness produced the "St James's Gate" range of craft-style beers, available in a small number of Dublin pubs. The beers were: Pilsner Gold, Wicked Red Ale, Wildcat Wheat Beer and Dark Angel Lager.
A brewing byproduct of Guinness,Guinness Yeast Extract (GYE), was produced until the 1950s.
A grandson of the original Arthur Guinness,Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, was aLord Mayor of Dublin and was created abaronet in 1867, only to die the next year. His eldest sonArthur,Baron Ardilaun (1840–1915), sold control of the brewery to Sir Benjamin's third sonEdward (1847–1927), who was created Baron Iveagh in 1891 andEarl of Iveagh in 1919. The thenSir Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Baronet, launched the company on theLondon Stock Exchange in 1886. Up until then, the only other partners outside of the Guinness family were members of the Purser family, who shared control of the brewery throughout most of the nineteenth century. He,his son Rupert andgreat-grandson Benjamin, the second and third Earls, chaired the Guinness company until the third earl's death in 1992. There are no longer any members of the Guinness family on the board.
On 17 June 2007,The Sunday Independent first reported that Diageo was considering selling most of the St. James's Gate Brewery to take advantage of high property prices in Ireland.[36] The story was widely picked up by both national and international media organisations, but the proposal to build a new brewery atLeixlip on land belonging toDesmond Guinness was cancelled by the end of 2008. By then Irish property prices had dropped, and so the possibility of selling much of the current brewery to meet the lower cost of building a new one had passed.[37]
The following day, theIrish Daily Mail ran a follow-up story with a double-page spread complete with images and a history of the plant since 1759. Initially, Diageo said that talk of a move was pure speculation but in the face of mounting speculation in the wake of theSunday Independent article, the company confirmed that it is undertaking a "significant review of its operations". This review is 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.[38]
On 23 November 2007, an article appeared in theEvening Herald, a Dublin newspaper, stating thatDublin 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 inKilkenny andDundalk 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.[39] Two days later, theSunday Independent again reported that Diageo chiefs had met withTánaisteMary 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 to pay Ireland's 12.5 per cent rate rather than the UK's 28 per cent rate.[40]Diageo released a statement to theLondon Stock Exchange denying the report.[41]
In 2015, Diageo launched the Brewers Project, in an attempt to diversify the company's product range and expand into thecraft beer industry which had become popular.Hop House 13, alager named after a store at the St James's Gate brewery extant in the early 20th century, was heavily promoted onYouTube andsocial media.[42]
St. James's Gate in Dublin was traditionally the main starting point for Irish pilgrims to begin their journey on theCamino de Santiago (Way of St. James). The pilgrims'passports were stamped here before setting sail, usually forA Coruña, north of Santiago. It is still possible for Irish pilgrims to get these traditional documents stamped both at Guinness Storehouse andSt James' Church, and many do, while on their way toSantiago de Compostela.[43]
Guinness Storehouse, the "Home of Guinness", is Dublin's most populartourist attraction. A converted brewing factory, it is now a Guinness museum, incorporating elements from the old brewing factory to explain the history of its production. Some of the old brewing equipment is on show, as well as stout ingredients, brewing techniques, advertising methods and storage devices.
The exhibition takes place over seven floors, in the shape of a 14 million-pint glass of Guinness. The final floor is the Gravity Bar, which has an almost 360° panorama over the city, where visitors can claim a pint of "the black stuff".
The storehouse is where they used to add the yeast to the beer for fermentation.
Guinness Storehouse visitors do not get to see the beer being brewed in front of them, but from various vantage points in the building, you may see parts of the brewhouse, vats, grain silos and the keg yard.
Q:I s the 9,000-year lease still valid? A: The 9,000-year lease signed in 1759 was for a 4 acre brewery site. Today, the brewery covers over 50 acres, which grew up over the past 200 years around the original 4 acre site. The 1759 lease is no longer valid as the Company purchased the lands outright many years ago.
... Guinness stout remains the best-selling alcoholic beverage in Ireland, over the last year its consumption here has declined by nearly 4 per cent.
Nevertheless, Guinness continues to be Ireland's number one beer 'by a wide margin' according to Michael Patten, Group Corporate Relations Director at Diageo Ireland, 'More than 40 per cent of all draught beer sold in Ireland is a Guinness'.
53°20′40″N6°17′20″W / 53.34444°N 6.28889°W /53.34444; -6.28889
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