Patrick Ryan take a look at Guinness Brewery 120 years ago, when some of the most famous names in science and engineering took time out to tour the famous St James’s Gate complex.
Guinness. For millions of people worldside the famous pint is Ireland’s most identifiable export, drawing 1.6 million visitors every year to complete their pilgimage to St James’s Gate, making the Storehouse the country’s biggest tourist attraction.
Since launching in 2000 the brewery’s interactive experience has welcomed an incredible 25 million people, from some 200 countries to the glitzy, high-tech, 7-storey, site, culminating with a pint in the famous Gravity Bar and spectacular views across the capital.
Yet St James’s Gate was already a focal point for visitors at the end of the Victorian age, including some of the cleverest men in the world, and a book published a generation before the Great War and the 1916 Rising offers a glimpse into those bygone days.
The Guinness story featured prominently in Ireland: Industrial and Agricultural, published by Browne and Nolan Limited, and edited by William P. Coyne, used as the handbook for the Ireland pavilion in the Glasgow International Exhibition in 1901, which drew 11 million visitors from all over the world.
A revised edition seven years later, updated with the latest information from Guinness proved the basis for The Handbook to the City of Dublin and the Surrounding District.
Like a decent sup of stout it was quite a mouthfull, as was the British Association For The Advancement Of Science (BAAS) for whom it was prepared, ahead of their forthcoming high-profile conference which Dublin was chosen to host in 1908.
BAAS pioneered the practice of peer review – presenting and debating new discoveries – and the august organisation’s meeting in September that year drew some of the great minds of the age, including the father of nuclear psychics Ernest Rutherford, who four months later would win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and went on to serve as the association’s president in 1923.
Lecturers from Harvard and other leading universitiese argued about algebra, rubbed shoulders with chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists, as well as dignitaries like the Lord Lieutenant, and hobnobbed at garden parties hosted by St Patrick’s Cathedral and TCD’s Dunsink Observatory, before booking tours of Guinness Brewery and some of the capital’s distilleries.
No doubt they left impressed with what they saw, and tasted…
Guinness wasn’t short on geniuses. In 1899 they had hired the outstanding statistician William Sealy Gosset, who later became Head Brewer, and techniques which he developed for the company were soon widely adopted by other scientists, while at the two labs on site his fellow boffins beavered away on samples and conducted experiments on crops, all to to better the beer.
The company also worked to improve the quality of barley across Ireland, in conjunction with the Department of Agriculture, and the experimental brewery on site processed these crops, while plans for an experimental hop farm was also at an advanced stage.
A good grasp of numbers was certainly a help in taking in the sheer size of the operation.
In 1906 the facility produced just over 100 million gallons of beer a year, 2 gallons per head of population for the UK and Ireland. This raised above £1.1m (£157m/€185.5m today) in excise revenue for the British government, more than double the amount from the next largest brewery in the UK. Within 25 years Guinness would become the 7th-biggest company of any kind in the world.
“The stout manufactured consists of four kinds, viz. : porter, which is chiefly used in Ireland for draught ; extra stout, which is the article best known to the English public, but which is also largely used in Ireland ; export stout, generally exported in wood; and foreign stout, which is specially brewed and stored for the requirements of the bottlers, chiefly in Dublin, Liverpool, and London, by whom it is exported,” William Coyne’s handbook explained.
Arthur Guinness’s success was down to beating the English at their own game. The brewer began with ale, but switched to the rich, popular “porter”, thus named because it was the preferred tipple of porters: tough men who hefted backbreaking barrels and boxes around London markets like Covent Garden and Billingsgate.
This porter was also being imported here to meet Irish demand and Arthur Guinness saw it’s potential. In 1799 all production of his ale ceased with resources poured into the robust, dark beer which by 1820 was also known as “stout”. In 1825 Guinness began exporting Irish stout to England where it soon became wildly popular.
Fast forward to the start of the previous century and quenching thirst at home and abroad was still no easy task, as the handbook revealed, stating that the brewery employed about 3,240 workmen and clerks, with another 7,000 people earning their livelihood from operations there.
The Guinness family was known for treating workers well, offering decent pay and conditions at a time where miserable poverty and destitution were a grim reality in places like the Liberties.
In 1907 Guinness’s worker welfare schemes, supervised by Chief Medical Officer Sir John Lumsden ran to £40,000 a year (£6.14m/€7.25m today), which was 20% of the total annual wage bill.
A job there was generally for life, and roles varied widely depending on ability, education, background, family connections and of course religion.
Men from Protestant families occupied the more senior positions and as late as 1939 a brewer who wanted to marry a Catholic would be asked by Arthur Guinness, Son & Co Ltd to give them their formal title, to kindly furnish his resignation.
100 years after the gates swung open for business the site still only covered just four acres, but throughout the Victorian era this grew to over 50; to put it in context that means the brewery’s site expanded to 2.5 times the ground covered by Croke Park Stadium today.
Or perhaps we should say breweries’ sites.
“There are two breweries – the old and the new – the latter having been built, in 1879, as a 400-quarter plant, and subsequently extended to five times its original size – i.e., 2,000 quarters,” Coyne explained.
The plant was over three levels, all connected with a narrow-gauge railway. The first was about 60 feet above the river quay and made up of the two breweries, the fermenting rooms, the vat-houses, the stables, and the malt and hop stores.
Guinness preferred to use local crops, and made most of the malt they used, with the remainder sourced throughout Ireland or from England and Scotland and although some of hops came over the Irish Sea from Kent, much of the supply crossed the Atlantic from the United States.
Guinness’s second level housed the maltings, grains stores, a vat-house, and other buildings.
The third, lowest level on Victoria Quay was home to carpentry and cooperage, the cask-washing sheds, the racking and filling stores, as well as the loading platform where casks and other measures were sent out by horse-drawn dray, boat, or rail, with all the main railway companies running connecting lines into the brewery for ease of access.
The seven mile long, internal narrow gauge rail line was crucial to operations. Managers could call on 20 locomotives and about 450 various wagons to move malt, and casks as required.
Employee records show that one of the foremen loco drivers was Arthur Purcell, who joined in 1890 and retired after 49.5 years’ service on a good pension, though he’s remembered today as the great-grandfather of U2 frontman Bono.
To facilitate the work of Arthur and his men a spiral tunnel passed in two-and-a half-turns under the St James’s Gate yard to the mid level, and on to Cooke’s Lane.
This passage still connects the upper and lower levels of Guinness brewery, running straight as an arrow for 105 yards, and was accessed by staff through a stairway at James’s Gate, again finishing at Cooke’s Lane.
By 1907 Guinness owned 10 steamers, anchored at the North Wall until filled with casks by the company’s steam-barges, which could also supply other vessels waiting at the mouth of the Liffey to take the beer overseas.
Horsepower was used for local deliveries. The handbook notes that the company owned 210 drays and floats, and 171 horses (usually huge Clydesdales, weighing up to 1,000 kilos, and the slightly smaller Percherons) who had their own huge stable blocks at St. James’s Gate.
At busy times management contracted horses from companies like Richardson’s of Tara Street, who continued to drop off company casks and the new metal kegs which slowly replaced them around Dublin until 1961.
Guinness enthusiastically embraced technology but never at the expense of tradition, heritage and craftmanship.
“The cooperage consists of three divisions, dressing-shop, making-shop, and repairing-shop, together with branding-rooms,” the handbook declared, stressing that this work was still done by hand.
Coopers turned out 1,500 casks a week, usually from seasoned American White Oak, ensuring that their wooden staves, slowly and precisely curved through steam, sealed perfectly, and helping to extend their lives to approximately 10 years.
Like a cyberpunk dream, steam, and electricity were harnessed.
The reason Arthur Guinness had taken over Mark Rainsford’s Ale Brewery, a dilapidated and run down facility that had been on the market for a decade by 1759, for £45 per annum on a 9,000 year lease, was a combination of it’s price and proximity to the River Liffey, and the handbook notes that 150 years on the brewery needed 600 million gallons of water every year.
On the top level 10 multi-tubular Lancashire boilers evaported 10,000 lbs of water – about 4,500 litres – an hour, between them processing just over 45,000 litres every 60 minutes.
“A flue, common to all the boilers, runs along under the roof of the house and discharges into a steel, brick-lined chimney, 162 feet high, built on a steel gantry at the roof-level,” the book revealed.
The brewery also contained four of these models at the cooperage level which in 1907 was about to be extended to incorporate another two, larger models.
A 250 kw low-pressure turbo was connected to a steam system, supplied from the various exhausts from all the site’s engines, to heat liquors and the many buildings on the huge site, and during summertime, to dry grain.
Most of the facility was electrified by this time, powered by about 300 motors dotted through the complex.
Passing the state-of-the-art Cooling Plant which used chemicals on the water and brine systems to drop the temperature, scientists and engineers would doubtless have been equally impressed by the adjoining Electric Generating Station located right beside the upper boiler house. AaSteam was conveyed through a ring main, and the station contained six powerful generators, including two 500 kw high-pressure, turbo-power models.
Communications were another key consideration, both internally and externally. Guinness staff delivered letters by horse and trap all over Dublin, and messenger boys could take written orders around the site, but by 1900 Ireland had 56 telephone exchanges too, and Guinness Brewery embraced this technology, as the handbook explained.
The coal bill for St James’s Gate must have put the divil himself to shame.
Breweries run around the clock and this massive facility burned it’s way through 10,000 tons of the black stuff to churn out endless pints of the black stuff, annually.
With a lot of hot coal and a workforce of smokers the company, like other brewers and distillers, wisely developed it’s own fire brigade, and built two main fire stations, one at the St James’s Gate level and the other at the cooperage level.
The crews and their engines trained and worked on power washing duties day-to-day but could respond without delay if an alarm sounded, with fixed hydrants and high pressure hoses located throughout the buildings, and ordinary ground-hydrants in the yards.
Much thought went into the design and layout of the plant, and modern add-ons were generally impressive all-steel constructions, such as the new fermenting house in Market Street, standing 125 feet high and 170 feet long, and the second such facility, in Brewery No. 2 of similar construction.
Messrs Guinness certainly took their legacy seriously. The list of departments, and sub departments within the site was staggering, and the skills needed to produce the perfect pint or bottle more complex than a Latin mass.
120 years on innovative products like Guinness 0.0, an alcohol-free beer, opened new markets for the beverage.
The current owners, the London and New York-listed Diageo, whose brands include Baileys Irish Cream, Johnny Walker and J&B scotch, having reconsidered plans to move production away from St James’s Gate, are investing another €30m in this canned beer that many say tastes just as good as a standard stout.
It isn’t rocket science, ladies and gentlemen. Alcohol rich or alcohol-free, sure isn’t it the taste that matters?
Flann O’Brien put it so well: “A pint of plain is your only man.”
Here’s to another century of good decisions.
