Pub sign of the all-pink painted O’Shea’s Bar in the colourful village of Sneem, Ring of Kerry, County Kerry, Ireland
Some background information:
Go to an Irish pub and you’re likely to see one of Guinness’ more famous and curious advertising characters: a toucan toting one or even two pints of Guinness on its beak. However, toucans reside in the treetops of Central or South America, and not in the open hillsides of Ireland. So why does Guinness use the bird to represent a unique Irish beer? The story dates back to an English advertising in the 1930s.
At that time, the London-based advertising company S.H. Benson asked the artist John Gilroy to create an advertisement featuring a family drinking Guinness. But no one could agree on what the family should look like. So one day Benson went to the circus with his son and saw a sea lion balancing a ball on his nose. He thought: "Wouldn't it be a lot of fun if I drew a sea lion with a pint of Guinness on his nose?"
The sea lion was indeed the first Guinness animal advertisement Gilroy drew, which led to others featuring bears, kangaroos, sloths, turtles, crabs, ostriches and pelicans. But finally the toucan, which first appeared in 1935, prevailed, probably due to the animal's colour and cheeriness. In the 1940s and 1950s, Gilroy also drew a series of American-specific toucan advertisements featuring toucans flying over iconic American landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Rushmore and the Empire State Building. But those were never approved for release by Guinness.
Guinness is an Irish dry stout that is one of the most successful alcohol brands worldwide, brewed in almost 50 countries, and available in over 120. It is also the best-selling alcoholic drink in Ireland. In 1759, the stout originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness at St. James's Gate, Dublin.
Guinness's flavour derives from malted barley and roasted unmalted barley, a relatively modern development, not becoming part of the grist until the mid-20th century. For many years, a portion of aged brew was blended with freshly brewed beer to give a sharp lactic acid flavour. Although Guinness's palate still features a characteristic "tang", the company has refused to confirm whether this type of blending still occurs. The draught beer's thick, creamy head comes from mixing the beer with nitrogen and carbon dioxide.
Arthur Guinness started brewing ales in Leixlip, County Kildare, but moved with his business to the St. James's Gate Brewery in Dublin in 1759, where he began to brew stout. Ten years after establishment, Guinness exported his beer for the first time, when six and a half barrels of stout were shipped to England. Subsequently, the business expanded by adopting steam power and further exporting to the English market. On the death of Benjamin Guinness, the founder’s grandson, in 1868 the business was worth over £1 million, and the brewery site had grown from about 1 acre to over 64 acres.
Because of the Irish Free State's "Control of Manufactures Act", the company moved its headquarters to London in 1932. In 1983, a non-family chief executive Ernest Saunders was appointed and arranged the reverse takeover of the leading Scotch whisky producer Distillers in 1986. Saunders was then asked to resign following revelations that the Guinness stock price had been illegally manipulated. These revelations have become known as the "Guinness 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. Guinness paid several people and institutions, most notably American arbitrageur Ivan 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 1997, the company merged with Grand Metropolitan to form Diageo plc, today the world’s largest distiller and distributor of different spirits. However, the Guinness family still owns 51 per cent of the brewery. After having closed the last Guinness brewery in the US in 1954, Guinness opened its first US brewery in 64 years in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2018. The St. James's Gate Brewery in Dublin, (according to Diageo "one of the most profitable breweries in the world"), can be visited. The Guinness Storehouse on the site is a major tourist attraction, which has already received over 20 million visitors since its opening in 2000.
