Despite Wesley’s disappointments with the fledgling evangelical church in Ireland, there is little doubt that he had a profound influence on Arthur. This came not just from Wesley’s insistence upon a transforming brand of salvation, but also from evangelical social teaching that meshed with what was already in Arthur’s heart. We must recall that Methodism was conceived in evangelical social outreach. The tiny Holy Club at Oxford, which became the first society (or small group) of Methodism, included John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield, to name but a few. This group perfected holiness by visiting prisoners, taking up collections for the poor, and urging the rich to fulfill their Christian obligations to society. Whitefield alone founded orphanages, funded feeding centers, and even challenged the traditional relations between slave owners and slaves when he visited America. Wesley did much the same and worked to make each of his societies an agent of social good. He also preached both the virtues and the responsibilities of wealth. “We must exhort all Christians to gain all they can and to save all they can; that is, in effect to grow rich,” Wesley insisted. Yet the corollary was that this gaining of wealth was to allow the Christian man to “give all he can to those in need.”
Though we cannot know the precise degree of connection between John Wesley and Arthur Guinness, we do know that Arthur lived out Wesley’s social values for the rest of his life. He was, as we’ve seen, a champion of rights for Roman Catholics in Ireland and he modeled this conviction by his treatment of his own Catholic workers. This was at a time when such views might easily have cost him customers and standing in society. He was, too, on the board of Meath Hospital for many years and he eventually became its governor, in charge of assuring that the “relief of the poor in the Earl of Meath’s Liberties” was fully supported. He also joined an organization called the Friendly Brothers of St. Patrick, whose aim was the abolition of dueling, still a source of widespread scandal at the time. Beyond these associations, he supported a variety of charities and even promoted Gaelic arts and culture as a means of instilling an ennobling sense of heritage in his countrymen.
Some historians have concluded that these efforts were merely the attempts of a middle-class merchant to impress his betters with good works. There may be some truth in this. Arthur was indeed ambitious and would not have wanted to seem lacking in the generosity expected of a rising merchant in Georgian Dublin. Still, there was another favorite project of his that seems confirmation of both the purity of his faith and his concern for social good: he was the founder of the first Sunday schools in Ireland.
Arthur was influenced in this by the famous educational reformer Robert Raikes. Born in Gloucester, the city of George Whitefield’s birth, in 1736, Raikes was the son of a newspaperman who published the Gloucester Journal. After inheriting the publishing business from his father in 1757, Raikes grew alarmed at the state of children in the slums of England and began using his paper to draw attention to the plague of grinding poverty and vicious crime that tormented England’s cities.
Having some knowledge of the prison system, he concluded that vice was “better prevented than cured.” He therefore became convinced that education was the key and created a system for offering instruction on Sundays in Bible, reading, and other basic subjects to the children of the poor. As a devoted Anglican, Raikes believed that basic education, combined with the leavening work of Scripture and church attendance, would change lives for the better. The movement spread rapidly, though it was opposed by conservatives who viewed Raikes as a meddler and by Sabbatarians who thought it a sin to conduct a school on Sundays.
As Raikes described the curriculum, “The children were to come after ten in the morning, and stay till twelve; they were then to go home and return at one; and after reading a lesson, they were to be conducted to Church. After Church, they were to be employed in repeating the catechism till after five, and then dismissed, with an injunction to go home without making a noise.” Though critics dubbed the effort “Raikes’s Ragged School,” by 1831 Sunday schools in Great Britain were ministering to more than 1.25 million children, which was approximately one-quarter of the population of poor children in England at the time. Others emulated Raikes’s methods, notably Hannah Moore in Somerset; of course, Raikes is celebrated today as the father of the Sunday school movement worldwide.
Arthur Guinness became a champion of the Sunday school cause. In 1786, he extended Raikes’s work to Ireland by organizing the first Sunday school in Dublin. The slim records we have show that Arthur funded the effort nearly by himself in the early days, did much of the organizing work alone at first, and spoke often to gatherings of his merchant friends to solicit their help. Given that he risked offending Roman Catholics, grumbling conservatives, the comfortable, and even Sabbatarians by his efforts, Arthur’s courageous devotion to this movement says much about what he was willing to brave to fulfill his sense of calling in the world.
Yet none of these efforts would have been possible or noteworthy had Arthur Guinness not been skilled at brewing beer. We should visualize him at this time in his life as busy with his various social causes, yes, but also in constant search of how best to improve his standing in the competitive world of brewing. There would be much tasting and sniffing and fingering of ingredients. Frequent conversations with his men and much culling of brewing talk at his clubs would have helped as well. He would draw, too, from the wisdom of his forebears: from the brewing legacy of Grandfather Read, his mother, and of course his father, Richard, now dead since 1766. He would have learned to trust himself, as well, given that he now had decades of valuable experience to lean upon.
Still, he had yet to make the shift that would win him world renown. He was still brewing both ale and the dark stout that had become quite the fashion. In his history with the brew that he would be associated with for generations to come, he is confirmation that the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong. He was not the first or the best or the only brewer to produce dark porter at this time. But he was, perhaps, the most consistent, the most willing to ride the currents of his age, and he was blessed with good timing. If history favors the bold over the most gifted, then Arthur is certainly encouragement to those who are willing to be the former in recognition that they are incapable of being the latter.
Arthur was not the first to brew porter, as we have seen.
That distinction likely goes to Ralph Harwood Shoreditch in London, who was already brewing a dark beer two years before Arthur was born. This early effort had the unappetizing name of “Entire Butt,” a butt being a barrel and the word entire referring to the combination of three types of beer in one barrel to produce the desired effect. The beer was immediately popular. By 1727, when Arthur was but three, a Swiss visitor to England wrote, “The greater quantity of this beer is consumed by the working classes. It is a thick and strong beverage and the effect it produces, if drunk to excess, is that of wine. This ‘porter’ costs three pence a pot. In London there are a number of alehouses where nothing but this sort of beer is drunk.”
The celebrated strength of this dark beer was easily explained. Brewers, in the unending experimentation that was part of brewing life in that day, had learned to use extra portions of charred malt and barley to give their beer both body and color. More hops than usual were employed, as well, to add flavor and to help preserve the brew over time. The art, though, was in gaining more from the ingredients by prolonging the mashing, boiling, and fermentation process. The result was a more robust and stable beer that could be stored longer and would survive the jostling of export without going bad.
Arthur did not quickly rest his reputation on this new dark porter as some other brewers did. English price controls gave English brewers a distinct advantage over Irish brewers, particularly in production of porter, and so in his early days at St. James’s Gate, Arthur brewed almost exclusively Irish ale. At some point, probably before 1783, he began brewing the dark beer that was becoming so popular. We can see in the Journals of the Irish H
ouse of Commons that by this same year, 1783, Arthur took pride in his association with dark beer, for as he said in testimony before a parliamentary committee, “a porter brewer buys nothing but the best, as nothing else will answer.” By 1799, though, he had made up his mind. He brewed his last ale on April 22, and from then on St. James’s Gate became a “porter brewery.”
Now the race was as much with the legally favored English brewers as it was with brewers at home. Fortunately, competition motivates, usually improving both product and service in the fight for market share. This seems to have been the case at St. James’s Gate, for as Jonathan Guinness wrote in his moving Requiem for a Family Business,
In Arthur’s day brewing was still an art, not a science . . . there were no laboratories to analyze samples of barley and hops; the brewer’s eye was the only measuring tool. As to yeast, it is a living organism, and a quick-breeding one; and even now with strict scientific control it can develop a genetic mutation so inconvenient as to require the destruction of an entire batch. Arthur must have mastered all these problems better than most. In particular, he was among the first Irishmen to become really good at producing the black porter. Once Arthur Guinness and the other Irish brewers—he had competitors—had cracked the technical problem and produced a porter as good as that which came from London, it was worth their while to concentrate on it. Soon the Irish product not only equaled the London porter, but surpassed it; after conquering the Dublin market, Irish porter became in demand in Britain.
We should not ignore here one of the great factors in the rise of great men: timing. Just as the St. James’s Gate brewery was hitting its stride, Ireland began enjoying a period of independence from England that was a result both of the American Revolution and the efforts of famed Irish statesman— and Olivia Guinness’s cousin—Henry Grattan. A new Constitution in 1782 gave Ireland freedom from political and economic restrictions that had been imposed since medieval times. Ireland would now enjoy seventeen years of unprecedented legislative freedom, an era that is known to later history as the age of Grattan’s Parliament.
Arthur certainly benefited from this era of freedom, as did all in the rising merchant class, but he was also well served by Henry Grattan’s support for Irish brewing. In a letter to Arthur, Grattan wrote that the Irish brewing industry was “the natural nurse of the people and entitled to every encouragement, favor and exemption.” Political winds could not have been blowing in a better direction for Arthur and at just the time when several other forces were converging in his favor: the political benefits of his marriage, his retooling of the brewery, his mastery of the brewing trade, and his reputation as an exceptional man.
There would be political storms ahead, of course. Rather than continue on the path of allowing Ireland further freedom, England would eventually reverse herself and force an Act of Union in 1801. This act would abolish self-government and merge Ireland into the United Kingdom led by the same foolish monarch who had already lost the American colonies. Ireland would fight for her liberty for more than another hundred years—sad, tragic years of blood and bitterness.
Yet through these years, Arthur Guinness and his growing family prospered. The brewery at St. James’s Gate thrived. Arthur added on, innovated, hired the best men, and dreamed of greater brewing glory. He was already an admired man, having risen high in Dublin society and in respect among his fellow brewers. He continued to serve his beloved social causes and saw each of them do far-reaching good. Sunday schools dotted the land; Meath Hospital grew and served the poor well; the frequency of duels declined; and many of the causes Arthur supported met with stunning success.
Even in old age, he was beset with a classic brewer’s disease: the need to experiment and reach for that better brew. Having made the decision to brew only porter, he then began brewing a number of variations on the dark beer theme. There was “Town Porter,” intended for sale in and near Dublin. There was also “Country Porter” for the far regions of Ireland. Then, too, there was “Keeping Porter,” which was brewed for blending with other beers and, finally, “Superior Porter,” which was a strong beer available in all markets.
As late as December 1801, little more than a year before he died, he wrote in his brewer’s notebook of an idea for “West India Porter.” It would be higher in hops and alcohol than his other brews, he envisioned—thus allowing it to survive long journeys overseas—and it would be intended for export to the Caribbean as the name for the beer suggests. It was a brilliant idea, one fit for the times, and we even know how he began to brew it from the notes that he kept. His West India Porter would combine seventy-five parts black malt to fifty-five parts pale malt with twenty parts brown malt. It was an innovation, and Guinness scholars conclude that this unique recipe makes West India Porter the direct precursor to the Foreign Extra Stout that is still brewed today. It was the beginning, then, of the oldest continuously brewed beer in the world.
Arthur Guinness passed from this life on January 23, 1803. His children would go on to lead the brewery he founded to new heights; the cause of caring for the less fortunate to the greater glory of God would also live on in the Guinness generations to come. Arthur would certainly have been pleased, though the eventual global reach of the ramshackle brewery he leased in 1759 could certainly have never entered his mind.
Yet, as the master brewer he was, he would have been especially pleased with one of his contributions that lives on to this day. It is not the kind of legacy most other men would have understood, but Arthur Guinness and men of his kind—men who had felt their newly harvested barley and who knew the smell of malt and who could tell a good wort by the taste—would have nodded in knowing respect.
You see, the yeast that is used to brew beer is unique. It is not like the yeast used for bread, which dies at high temperatures, never to be used again. Instead, the yeast used for brewing beer grows in the process and can be skimmed off and used again and again. This was such a miraculous discovery to early brewers that they gave this reusable yeast the nickname “God-is-good.”
It is a moving tale and one of the legendary characteristics of brewing beer, but there is a more important point to the story. When Arthur went to Dublin to set up shop at St. James’s Gate, he carried with him a Kildare strain of yeast that he had likely first used at the White Hart Inn. That strain, in turn, may have been one developed or used by his father, Richard, on Dr. Price’s estate. So when Arthur went to Leixlip and then on to Dublin, he carried the descendant cells of yeast with him. In time, this strain would make its way to Guinness breweries around the world and thus down through the generations would go to work in Malaysia and Nigeria and Trinidad and even the United States. And today, 250 years later—despite the fact the Guinness is brewed in great computerized factories of stainless steel and by PhD technicians wearing lab coats—the original strain of Arthur’s yeast is still at work “festering away in the oldest tuns, dating from even before 1760.”
And so his labors live, not just in the brewery and in the faith and generosity of the Guinnesses who followed him, but also in the very beer that was his life’s work. It is pleasant to think about how he might have enjoyed the thought that his yeast—grown in wooden vats and gently tended when many of the nations where it is sold today did not yet exist—has helped produce the nearly ten million pints a day of Guinness stout consumed in the modern world.
Author at the historic St. James’s Gate Brewery
3
AT THE SAME PLACE BY THEIR ANCESTORS
There is a theme in the affairs of men that has always been a source of wonderment to me. I found myself thinking about it often as I sat in the Guinness Archives at St. James’s Gate, researching the descendants of Arthur who filled the nineteenth century.
What troubles me is this: a man becomes famous because of his character and skill. Or perhaps, as Shakespeare wrote, he simply has fame thrust upon him. His deeds are celebrated, his words remembered and rehearsed. He is revered. Then, at the end of his life, as hi
s flame begins to fade, all eyes turn to his children. And the question becomes, Will the children prove themselves as gifted? Will they fulfill the mandate of their parent’s fame?
As often as not, the children of the great fall short of their potential, fail to live up to the hopes that have surrounded them nearly from birth. Though some honor their parents’ reputation by how they live, many come to regard their name as a burden—even a curse. It is painful to watch and perhaps in part because there seems to be no pattern. Loving parents are as likely to have children who despise their legacy as are parents of the more distant and neglectful kind.
The stories of these generational tensions could fill volumes, but a few examples make the point. There is the family line of the venerated American founding father, John Adams. Though his descendants include the brilliant statesman John Quincy Adams, the unfolding of the generations that followed this great man is a story of such decline that the leading book on the subject is titled Descent from Glory.
Then there was Winston Churchill, whose father, slipping daily into madness, hated his son and cursed him as a “public school wastrel.” Winston was haunted throughout his life by the specter of this disapproving figure and determined to make a better life with his own son, Randolph. The early years were sweet and full of hope and expectation. But the relationship soured and Randolph, given to drunkenness and rage, was even banned from his parents’ home during the dark years of World War II, when a father might have needed a loyal son. Finally, Randolph’s life came to an end, as one historian has said, “beneath hope, beneath promise, and nearly beneath notice.”
The Search for God and Guinness Page 7