I come not to praise Guinness, but to take you behind the scenes. Today is a big day in the history of Guinness, for it was on this day in 1759 that Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000 year lease on a disused brewery in Dublin. The 9,000 years thing is an example of Irish over-the-topism. At age 27 Arthur Guinness inherited £100 from his godfather and went out and bought a brewery west of Dublin. That brewery was a success, so a few years later in 1759 he bought the shuttered brewery at St. James Gate in Dublin and signed the famous lease. He made ales at first, but started on the new-fangled dark beers for which Guinness is famous in 1778. These were porters. The term "stout" was not used till the 1840s, long after Guinness senior was gone. So what is stout anyway? It's complicated, and I'm not going into the fine points here. It's enough to say that what's called stout today tastes nothing like those stouts of yesteryear. Tastes have changed over the c
At the end of the game, the king and the pawn both go back in the same box.—Italian proverb