Ingredients

Beer brewing can be traced all the way back to Mesopotamia, known as present-day Iraq and Iran, over five thousand years ago, when they found that barley was especially suitable for brewing. The word beer is thought to originate from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘baere’, meaning Barley. Today, Guinness purchase around two-thirds of the malting barley grown on the island of Ireland each year. Only the highest quality crop is used as its standard can greatly affect the taste of the beer.

Water has always been at the heart of our brewing process. Arthur Guinness knew the importance of using clean water in the brewery at St. James’s Gate and obtained access to the Dublin city watercourse as part of his original lease in 1759. We are obsessive about water and only the highest quality is used to brew Guinness. It comes from the Wicklow Mountains, around 40km from where you are standing right now. Contrary to popular belief, the water is not (and never has been) drawn from the River Liffey.

Hops were used for centuries as the bittering agent in beer and as a preservative. In the early 1800’s, Guinness brewers were faced with a challenge to keep the beer fresh on long sea voyages to distant lands. Our brewers love a challenge, so they put their heads together and created a beer with extra hops which acted as a natural preservative. In fact, there’s an entry in the Guinness brewer’s diary from 1801 detailing the recipe for our first export beer, created. to keep beer fresh over long hauls.

Brewers have traditionally saved the yeast from one brew for use in the next brews, and we now know for sure that the yeast used to brew Guinness today dates back to at least 1903 when the Guinness yeast library was established here at St. James’s Gate.