Looking for a reason to drink good beer? Hate prohibition? Like the 30s? Then check out Lucky Bucket’s Speak Easy Party April 17th at the brewery. Here is the press release.
Lucky Bucket Brewing Company & Sòlas Distillery are hosting a “Speak Easy” Costume Party on April 17th from 8pm until 1am at their brewery located [...]
History of the Guinness Brewery
Posted By Ryan Cairns on March 13th, 2009
Guinness brewery has a very long and rich history. Because of this I will merely be scratching the surface of telling the breweries story and I encourage you to check out the companies web site. They have some pretty amazing history information on their site available for all to see. <click here>
Arthur Guinness leased a brewery in Leixlip in 1755 brewing ale. Later he put his younger brother in charge of this brewery and moved on to the St. James Gate Brewery, Dublin in 1759. Upon taking over the brewery he signed a 9,000 year lease. The first Guinness was exported May 19, 1769 when six and a half barrels of ale were shipped to England.
His sales of porter are listed on tax data from 1778 during a time shortly after many brewers in the Dublin area had experimented with brewing porters in the 1760’s.
His major achievement to the overall legacy of the Guinness brewery was generating a major growth from 1797-1799. From 1778 on they only brewed porter and discontinued the production of ale. When he passed away in 1803 the annual output of the brewery was over 20,000 barrels a year.
Contrary to popular belief that Guinness created the term Stout in reference to beer the first use of the word was in a letter in the Egerton Manuscript dated 1677. The first Guinness beers to use the term were Single Stout and Double Stout in the 1840’s. They company brewed it’s last porter in 1974.
It became the largest brewery in Ireland in 1838, and the largest in the world in 1914 covering over 64 acres. It is no longer the largest brewery in the world but it is the largest brewer of Stout in the world.
In 1983 a non-family executive by the name of Ernest Saunders was appointed as Chief Executive and arranged for the hostile take over of the leading Scotch Whiskey producer Distillers in 1986. He was then asked to resign due to allegations that Guinness stock prices had been illegally manipulated. Since Distillers was worth more than Guinness the Guinness family shareholdings after the merger dropped below 10% and today no family members sit on the board.
The company later merged with Grand Metropolitan to form Diageo PLC in 2006. Diageo is the holding company for some major alcoholic beverage brands including: Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, Captain Morgan, Jose Quervo, and many other brands way to many to list here.
The rumors in early 2007 of Diageo selling most of the St. James Brewery in order to take advantage of high property prices in Ireland and then using the funds generated to build a new brewery at Leixlip was found to be true. The deal was canceled at the end of 2008 after the land prices in Ireland dropped closing the door on the possibility of selling a large part of the original brewery and building a new one. <more info>
I hope that you have enjoyed what I put together here for you to read but I would encourage you to research on your own because of the vast amount of history and information surrounding the brewery.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Similar Posts
Share
Posted in Brew History
Comments 0
