At present (1886) there are only seven firms of any note in Dublin; and of those existing a hundred years ago but two survive—Messrs. Sweetman’s and the well-known house of Messrs. Guinness, which has long been at the head of the trade in Ireland. To some English readers it may come as a revelation that at the present time this Irish firm is the greatest producer of malt liquors in the whole world.
Some account of the rise and progress of so vast a business cannot but be of interest to the student of industrial enterprise, but in the compass of the present work it will of course only be possible to give the merest outline of its growth.
Arthur Guinness, the great-grandfather of Sir Edward Guinness, the present owner, purchased the original premises from a Mr. Ransford in the year 1759. The business appears to have been of very modest dimensions, for the plant, as acquired by Arthur Guinness, included only one mash tun and one seventy-barrel copper. The brewery had, even at that time, been worked for a considerable period, certainly from the earliest years of the eighteenth century, and probably before that. {349}
The property, about one acre in extent, thus acquired in 1759, forms the nucleus of the present gigantic establishment. The principal brewhouse stands to-day precisely on the site once occupied by Ransford’s mash tun and copper; but since the commencement of the nineteenth century many additional properties have from time to time been acquired, until at present the total area occupied by the brewhouses and their belongings amounts to between forty and fifty statute acres.
For many years the dimensions of the business were but moderate. Wakefield, writing in 1809, states that Guinness was then only the second brewer in Ireland, Beamish and Crawford of Cork, who brewed upwards of 100,000 barrels a year, standing first.
Without attempting to account for or to describe the advance, since Wakefield’s day, of the great Dublin firm (made a limited liability company in October, 1886), we may briefly notice one or two points of special interest connected with the manufacture.
The materials used are absolutely confined to malt, pale and roasted, and hops. Of the latter a preference has always been shown for those of Kent, no other English varieties being used. But of late years American Hops have been largely consumed as well. The water for brewing is drawn from the City Watercourses, and not from the Liffey, as some people unacquainted with Dublin have supposed.
It would be impossible here to describe in detail the process or the plant of the St. James’ Gate Brewery, and owing to the position held by the firm it seems almost unnecessary to say that every modern improvement of the Engineer and the Scientist, whether for facilitating the operations of Brewing or for ensuring the safety and welfare of those employed, has been carefully investigated and judiciously applied. The minute attention which is paid to every detail of the process, from the manufacture and selection of the malt, to the treatment and storage of the beer in every stage, is matched by the liberal provision made for the men engaged in the work and their families.
To the visitor nothing is more astonishing than the size and number of the vats. Some of these huge erections of Oak and Iron contain no less than 90,000 gallons apiece; and to a lengthened storage in these is due in great measure the peculiar character of the Stout devoted to the foreign export trade. The tendency in most modern breweries has been to dispense with lengthened storage in vat. Not so here, and the erection of vats of great capacity has kept pace with the extension of the export trade.
Another remarkable feature is the large provision of ice machines, {350} or rather of engines for the cooling, by the evaporation of ether and ammonia, of fluid brine, which circulates by a complicated system of copper pipes through every part of the vast storehouses, and ensures a winter temperature on the hottest summer day. It is the extent to which this system is applied that is so striking in this establishment, where all is on so vast a scale that the ordinary units of measurement seem inadequate to convey a notion of the truth. The same may be said of the multitude of mains by which the finished beer is conveyed from the storage vats, a distance of half a mile beneath one of the principal streets of the city, to the lower portion of the works where the beer is “racked” into cask.