Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on his Dublin brewery
On 31 December 1759, Arthur Guinness took over an unused brewery at St. James's Gate in Dublin on a lease running 9,000 years, at £45 a year. The site grew into one of the biggest breweries in the British Empire, and its stout is now made in almost 50 countries.
Guinness began with ales, turned to porter in 1778, and first used the word stout in the 1840s for its Single Stout and Double Stout. Back then stout described strength rather than body or colour. For most of its history the firm made only variations on that one style, and Dubliners called porter plain, as in Flann O'Brien's line praising a pint of it.
Growth was startling for a company that refused to advertise, offer discounts or own a single pub. Sales rose from 350,000 barrels in 1868 to 779,000 in 1876, and when Guinness floated in October 1886 its shares were 20 times oversubscribed. By 1914 it brewed 2.652 million barrels a year, more than twice its nearest rival, Bass, and supplied over a tenth of the UK market.
The brewery also left a mark on mathematics. In 1899 it hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset, who published under the pen name Student; the t-test and t-distribution he devised for quality control still carry that name. Staff welfare was generous for the period too, costing £40,000 a year by 1907, a fifth of all wages. When the First World War came, over 800 employees enlisted on half pay with guaranteed jobs, and 103 never came back. The generosity had limits: before 1939, a brewer who wished to marry a Catholic was asked to resign.
The flavour comes from malted barley plus roasted unmalted barley, the latter only added in the mid-20th century, and the creamy head on draught comes from a nitrogen and carbon dioxide mix. The company moved its headquarters to London in 1932 and merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo.
Source: Guinness
