by Bill Barich
Still, I missed the old toasties. I missed the grill marks and the potato chips—I missed things as they were and always had been, I suppose, but my distress couldn’t compare to the grumbling of some aged veterans when Frank installed a big flat-screen TV on a wall. They called it a “monster,” yet Frank argued that it was essential to keep the sports fans happy, or they’d go somewhere else. There were other disagreements, as well. One veteran, incensed about a perceived breach of etiquette, mounted a boycott and led twenty-one of his pals to Corrigan’s—a potential loss of one hundred thousand dollars or so, if they were all worth five grand a year. The dispute was finally resolved through negotiation, though, and the ringleader and his crew returned to the stalwart stools and chairs they’d no doubt pined for during their brief rebellion.
The last thing Frank wanted was to offend his core clientele, but nobody in his right mind would deny the fact that the pub needed some work—and not just cosmetic work, although Frank and his partner also had plans to redecorate. There were plenty of minor repairs to be done, he told me once. The toilets were clean, for instance, but outmoded. Some women had complained about it to Frank, and swore they wouldn’t be back until he could provide bright, modern facilities. A dodgy back entrance to the pub offered an ideal opportunity for shady characters to wander in, perhaps with an ulterior motive in mind, and that had to be fixed, too, and a new door added, to keep out the riffraff.
Frank’s plans hardly sounded drastic or sensational, yet whenever you fiddle with an institution, it wobbles a bit. Nobody knows for sure which pillar or beam supports the mystery, so a wrong move has the power to bring down the whole structure. That would be a tragedy for Birchall’s. As a traditional pub, it was a triumph of the familiar and the everyday, and its homey comforts served its customers as an anchor in a rapidly growing city that might otherwise confuse or intimidate them. By its very nature, it suggested a reassuring continuity, and the regulars depended on the illusion that it would stay the same forever. What drew them back, time and again, was something ineffable, along with the craic, of course, and a treasured feeling of friendship and belonging.
Having lived in Dublin for a while, I couldn’t claim to be an innocent anymore. I’d been disabused of my naïve conception of Ireland as an enchanted place, where change happens slowly if it happens at all. Indeed, the Irish were devouring change with their breakfast, or being devoured by it—one couldn’t say for certain. Change floated over the island like a powdery, transformative dust, and if it settled on your shoulders you, too, might be transformed, although the end result, as with any hastily performed act of magic, couldn’t be calculated in advance. Your only choice was to put one foot in front of the other and stride toward a largely positive vision of the future, although you risked leaving the lessons of the past behind.
Such lessons are the blood, bone, and marrow of traditional pubs, but the pubs, too, were changing by the hour—or simply dying off in rural areas, at the alarming rate of one per day. The developers in the city were knocking them down to build apartments and stores, and paying a fortune for the privilege. The Foxhunter in suburban Lucan, blessed with three acres, had recently fetched $20.5 million at auction, for instance. One out of every three pubs sold in County Dublin in 2007 was bought for its land, not its trade, and though Birchall’s would be spared that fate, its future was unclear. In the new Ireland of Range Rovers, security alarms, and pistachio oil, was there still room for a quiet place apart devoted solely to talk and drink? That was a question worth investigating.
Chapter 4
THE ANCIENT BIRTHPLACE OF GOOD TIMES
Though the public house has long been central to Ireland’s social life, it has never received the sort of scholarly attention it deserves, I discovered at the National Library, a grand old building in Dublin, where I took up residence in the Reading Room to explore its history. Contrary to popular opinion, the pub isn’t even an Irish invention, but they were ready to embrace the idea, having brewed ale for centuries. St. Patrick, the scourge of snakes and sinners, counted a brewer among his entourage—the priest Mescan, who was said to be “without evil”—while St. Brigid made her own beer and once turned a leper’s bathwater into a bucket of suds by blessing it, according to the hagiographers. Monasteries provided ale with meals and offered it as sustenance to travelers. One monastery thought it so high in nutrition that the friars were supplied with a gallon a day.
Only when the Normans invaded in the twelfth century did the first taverns appear in Dublin. The Normans were serious lovers of wine, who imported bordeauxs and burgundies from France by ship, sometimes swapping for fish or hides. They also depended on lesser varietals, or vini corrupti, from Spain and England, adulterating them with ginger, cinnamon, and other spices to mask the dreadful flavor. Wine was not unknown as a breakfast beverage, nor was the meal a light repast, at least for the prior of Holy Trinity, who enjoyed a few glasses of red with his roast goose or pigeon. At first the shops that cropped up on Winetavern Street sold casks for the domestic use of the nobility—the Normans categorized the Irish as “foreigners”—but gradually people of the professional class met in them to drink and conduct their daily business.
The Normans liked their ale, too, and most households employed a brewer, while in Irish homes the task fell to women, whose ale was sweet and unhopped. (Hops won’t grow in Ireland’s cool climate.) Some women acquired a reputation for being the best in their local area—hence, the term “local” to denote a pub—and sold what they produced, yet the demand was so constant and wide-reaching that quality was scarcely a concern. “Any woman, if her credit will serve to borrow a pan, and to buy but a measure of malt, setts up brewing,” one observer wrote. The “pan” was a brewer’s cauldron, and they could be had at any street market. Soon the Irish followed the example of their occupiers and drank their purchases on the spot, a custom that gave birth to the dank, smelly, flea-ridden alehouses of the poor, where mangy dogs wandered among the dreary, sodden customers.
The Norman influence faded over time, hastened by the Black Death, or bubonic plague, that killed off a third to a half of Ireland’s population between 1347 and 1351. The displaced Irish also embarked on a series of risings and recaptured their estates, while the Normans themselves began to mimic the habits of the “foreigners” they had oppressed and blended in among the natives. The distinction between a tavern and an alehouse started to blur, and the two ultimately melded and evolved into the public house. Though the food at pubs could be exceptional, with salmon and oysters fresh from the sea, the rooms were often filthy and reprehensible, and gambling and prostitution flourished.
“There are whole streets of taverns,” sighed Barnabe Rich, an English soldier who lived in the city, “and it is a rare thing to find a house in Dublin without a tavern, as to find a tavern without a strumpet.” The strumpets were so numerous that a decree was passed in 1561 ordering alehouse proprietors to post a sign on their doors stating their intent to “extirpate whoredom.” Any woman on the premises was assumed to be for hire, causing one of the accused to respond with a rejoinder clever enough to be recorded for posterity. “I was ’tis true for debt in jail,” she protested, “but never got my living by my tail.”
Oddly, ale was almost unknown in rural Ireland, where the spirits of choice were whiskey, first introduced in the fifteenth century, and poteen, a bootleg liquor usually distilled from a mash of potatoes, grain, and yeast. On the other hand, Dublin was so awash in ale that the British authorities felt compelled to stem its effects on the army of inebriates who stumbled through the streets, relieving themselves as necessary and sleeping where they collapsed. The first government act to try to curtail the spread of pubs became law in 1635—although its purpose was also political, as the journalist Cian Molloy has pointed out.
Many mishiefes and inconveniences doe arise from the excessive number of alehouses, from the erection of them in woods, bogges, and other unfit places, and many of them not in towne-ships, but dispers
edly, in dangerous places, and kept by unknown persons not under-taken for, whereby many times they become receptacles for rebels and other malefactors and harbours of gamesters and other idle, disordered, and unprofitable livers, and that those that keep those alehouses for the most part are not fitted or furnished to lodge or entertaine travelers in any decent manner.
The act failed miserably. By 1667, there were 1,500 licensed premises in Dublin, while one third of the city’s residences were serving drinks by 1710, so the “unprofitable livers” failed to be inconvenienced and continued on their merry way. The battle lines were drawn, though, with the forces of order and rectitude on one side and those of Bacchus and chaos on the other. Colonel Richard Lawrence, a Cromwellian planter, belonged to the former camp. He hated drink even more than he despised the pope, and he published a pamphlet in 1682 that showed exactly how much, by his own arithmetic, the “wealth-wasting lusts” of the Irish cost each year.
Swearing, 20,000 pounds
Gambling, 52,000 pounds
Adultery, 67,000 pounds
Drunkenness, 210,000 pounds
Even priests were victims of the booze epidemic. Oliver Plunkett, the Archbishop of Armagh, begged his peers to stay out of pubs and quit bingeing on whiskey. “And since deeds speak louder than words,” said Plunkett, in a gesture of supreme self-sacrifice, “I never take a drink between meals. Let us remove this defect from an Irish priest, and he will be a saint.”
The Lord’s Day Act of 1685 forbade pubs from opening during the hours of divine worship, but again it had little impact on the general revelry. The ability of Dubliners to misbehave had reached epic proportions, as this doggerel about the antics of drunken tradesmen attests:
Wine they swallow down like fishes
Now it flies about in glasses
Now they toast their dirty lasses
Now they throw away their poses
Hats and wigs fly all about
Now they part with heavy curses
Broken heads and empty purses.
Worse lay ahead when gin, already a blight in London, reached the shores of Ireland in the early eighteenth century. William of Orange, who wanted no truck with the French and had put a stop to any shipments of brandy, was its champion. Cheap and potent, gin spawned an underworld of purgatorial shops where, for just pennies, you could stay drunk for days at a time. At century’s end, one quarter of all the deaths in Ireland of adults over twenty could be ascribed to the abuse of alcohol. Poverty was at the core of the problem, of course, along with the hideous living conditions it fostered, but some theorists have suggested that the Irish, as a deprived and colonized people, may have deliberately, if unconsciously, chosen to dull the senses.
Ale remained the preferred tipple in pubs, but the alewife brewers had surrendered the territory to professionals by then. More than ninety breweries were scattered around Dublin, with the densest concentration on James’s Street by the Liffey, once part of a “whipping run” where wrongdoers felt the sting of the lash in full public view. If you stroll there from Stephen’s Green, you feel as if you’re traveling back in time, leaving behind the fancy shops on Grafton Street and skirting Trinity College before you turn toward Christ Church Cathedral and the Liberties, where the sidewalks are crowded with residents, especially women pushing prams, out for a breath of fresh air. On James’s Street, you can read the city’s age in the cobbled pavement and fortresslike structures, none more somber and invincible looking than the Guinness complex, the only brewery in the area still in business.
The tale of Arthur Guinness, the firm’s founder, is so familiar in Ireland that some schoolchildren can probably recite it from memory. Born in Celbridge, County Kildare in 1725, where his father worked as the steward to Archbishop Price of Cashel and brewed the estate’s beer, he inherited two hundred pounds sterling on the archbishop’s death and invested it in a brewery in nearby Leixlip, also in Kildare, operating it with his brother Richard. Three years later, he moved to Dublin and signed a nine-thousand-year lease on a defunct brewery at St. James’s Gate for forty-five pounds per annum—a lease that’s still in effect. The three-acre property included draft horses, a hayloft, and plenty of rats.
Though the location was excellent, allowing Guinness to transport kegs down the river on barges, he soon realized how difficult it would be to crack the city’s market. The excise laws gave the English a leg up on the Irish, who were also obliged to buy their hops only from colonial suppliers at an inflated price, so beer imported from England cost the publicans much less. Only when “Uncle Arthur” decided to stop brewing ale in 1779 and concentrate on porter did his luck begin to change.
The credit for inventing porter ordinarily goes to Ralph Harwood of the Bell Brewhouse in Shoreditch, who developed it around 1722. Before that, England’s bestselling beer wast hree-thread, possibly a blend of pale ale, new brown ale, and stale brown ale. A publican did the mixing, but Harwood’s Entire, a bitter, dark-brown beer, required no fuss and came in a single cask ideal for export. It got its name from the men who “ported” goods at such London markets as Covent Garden and Smithfield. They had adopted the brew as their own, and swallowed it with the gusto of dockers. Guinness’s version, officially ruby-colored, was darker, richer, and more full-bodied than the original—a “stouter” porter, later simply stout. Its secret ingredient was a special strain of yeast whose clone is still around, supposedly kept under lock and key in the Directors’ Safe at St. James’s Gate.
Arthur Guinness, though a kind employer, could not be called politically progressive. When he opposed the Society of United Irishmen, a group dedicated to bridging the religious divide, reforming parliament, and ending England’s dominion, his stout was pilloried as “Black Protestant Porter.” In fact, the company was slow to hire Catholics and instead put teetotalers at the top of its list, because they were so dependable. Guinness’s attitude toward its employees has always been patriarchal, and it isn’t unusual for three or four generations of a family to have worked there. Boys in search of a job used to sit for an aptitude test in their early teens, and if they had a relative with the firm, they received a gold star on their exam that granted them preferential treatment. For the most part, they ran errands, but one boy was assigned the task of feeding raw fish to the cats that killed the rats. They got no free stout, of course, but adults did, still two pints a day at stations around the plant into the 1970s.
The plant covers fifty-five acres at St. James’s Gate. The Guinness Storehouse, a sort of museum with a plentifully stocked, logo-heavy gift shop, is Ireland’s leading tourist attraction, having surpassed the Book of Kells. If you take the self-guided tour, you’ll learn that the word “beer” derives from the Anglo-Saxon for barley, a cereal that grows handily in the acidic soil of the Republic. Guinness buys about ninety thousand tons a year, or two thirds of the country’s production. Hops come from abroad, with the most desirable found south of the equator. The water isn’t drawn from the Liffey, although a few drinkers believe that it is, just as they subscribe to a hoary legend about a brewery worker who once drowned in a vat and lent the stout a remarkably delicious flavor as he decomposed. Streams in the mountains of Kildare are the actual source, and the soft water has a low mineral content, with hints of calcium and magnesium sulfate.
Do you care that Robert Louis Stevenson had some Guinness sent to him when he was living in Samoa? Or that Guinness Foreign Export in bottles, almost twice as strong as keg stout, is considered an aid to sexual potency in Africa and the Caribbean? Maybe, maybe not. But you’re sure to be astonished by the sheer thrust of the company’s marketing efforts when your tour concludes at the glass-fronted Gravity Bar, seven floors above the city. The bar, closed to the ordinary public, gives you a magnificent 360-degree view, and while you savor your single complimentary pint—you can’t buy a second, so don’t bother to try—you’ll marvel at how the firm has made James Joyce part of the team by stenciling quotes from his books on the windows, just as it features a harp,
the national symbol, on its glassware and cans. Guinness is Ireland, the branding suggests, and it forges a bond so absolute that you’ll feel unpatriotic if you don’t finish your jar.
The presence of Guinness may be inescapable in Dublin, but the Irish taste for it has been declining sharply for the past few years, with pub sales down by 7 percent in 2007. (A new ad campaign launched in 2008 has increased the turnover at off-licenses, though.) To address the trend toward lager, the company has tested a series of lighter occasional brews such as North Star, and also Guinness “lite” at 2.7 percent alcohol, but the beers died a slow death at Birchall’s and elsewhere. In some quarters, stout is regarded as an old man’s drink, good for reveries but too heavy and torpor-inducing to yield the instant buzz young clubbers crave—they can knock back a pint of Carlsberg much faster. Solitary contemplatives such as Tom Corkery may be as antique as thatched roofs someday, but the future of the Guinness brand is global, anyway, with about two thirds of the business already done abroad.
The global push began shortly after Guinness merged with Grand Metropolitan, a food-industry giant (Burger King, Pillsbury, Häagen-Dazs, Alpo Petfoods) in 1997 to form Diageo, the world’s leading distributor of premium drinks (Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker, Tanqueray, Jose Cuervo, and others). Diageo brews Irish Budweiser at the St. Francis Abbey in Kilkenny, but its ambitions are far more extensive and stretch across 180 countries and territories. The black stuff is brewed in about fifty of them, including Nigeria, the brand’s second-largest consumer behind Britain. (Ireland lags in third place.) Nigerian sales rose by 18 percent in 2007, sparked by TV ads that praise Guinness as the “home of greatness,” whatever that means. Moreover, Diageo does its best to promote the notion that an “Irish” pub will be a lucrative investment anywhere on earth, thereby increasing the number of outlets for its stout and other beers and whiskeys.