Guinness Art

I tremble like a starving chiuahua in the snow before the inevitable milestone of describing the Greatest Possible Trip in the Universe. St. Jamess Gate Brewery hath graced us undeserving offal with the beneficence of openness, and so I went on Saturday. I wrote other blog entries following Twain, Jesus, Wilde, Chapman, Bauby, and other minor writers without a second thought. Gonna take on Barack soon. Bah. Now I must apologize in advance to the spirit of Arthur Guinness, whose abridged first name is almost as beautiful as his second, for my imminent inadequate effort to portray the visit there.

The Guinness Storehouse is Ireland's number one tourist destination, and may well be the most vaunted of all beveragemaking destinations. Been to the Coke headquarters and museum, Becks tour, Hofbrauhaus, two whiskey distilleries, and wineries in Napa, Sonoma, Austria, France, Spain, northern Italy, and even Temecula. They were nice, but none had comparable majesty. The Storehouse is shaped like a pint glass, so patrons (counterintuitively) get higher and higher in the pint as their journey progresses. By the second floor, I learned to tag along inconspicuously with a group of short ladies aged 60-80 who seemed totally uninterested in the tour guide's prattle about retronasal breathing and ensuing free tastes. How ungentlemanly would I have been to refuse to help these damsels in distress trying to slyly unload their beer tastes without offending the guide? And they say chivalry is dead. Don't remember much of the tour past the third floor. I assume it was fun.

They say an employee once fell in a vat of Guinness and drowned. An inquiry ensued as to whether he suffered before he died. They concluded that he had not. He left the vat and went to the bathroom eight times before dying.

I also walked around outside of the American College Dublin, Oscar Wilde's home from 1855-1878. There is only one thing in the world worse than not being talked about, and that is being dead.