Inside the Guinness-hype industrial complex
Words: Ed Cumming
Outside The Devonshire, a newish pub on a corner of Soho by Piccadilly Circus, the Guinness Bores stand five, sometimes six, deep. They are mostly men, wearing dark woollen overcoats. They look like they work in something that pays well. Insurance, perhaps, or advertising. They talk with the noisy confidence of people who know they are in the place to be and believe they belong there.
There are several reasons they are at The Devonshire rather than in any one of Soho’s 47 or so other pubs.
There is the reputation of the landlord, Oisín Rogers. He is a mop-haired Dubliner who built a name for himself among London’s post-work-pint professionals with The Guinea Grill, in Mayfair. His imprimatur has come to signify a certain kind of luxurious conviviality. There is his chef, Ashley Palmer-Watts, Heston Blumenthal’s protégé, who made his name with snail porridge and all the other molecular-gastronomy frippery, but has brought it back to basics for his new venture. His menu of prawn cocktail, steaks and sticky toffee pudding has won rave reviews from The Times, The Telegraph, Evening Standard and The Infatuation. There is the reputation on social media, with Instagram and TikTok deluged with posters shooting short visual odes to The Devonshire’s glories.
Image: Getty
Guinness is at the heart of it all. Rogers’s focus on Guinness, and also, perhaps, his central-casting Irishness, helped establish The Devonshire early on as a place for a decent pint of “the black stuff”. Since then, an ever-quickening flywheel of hype has built the pub’s Guinness into a tourist attraction in its own right. Guinness is available everywhere, but people want the Guinness at The Devonshire. They migrate from far corners of the city, and beyond, to sample the real deal. Just as importantly, they let everyone else know they are sampling it by taking photos and videos of themselves. To drink a Guinness at The Devonshire is to partake in a mass social ritual, identifying yourself as a tasteful consumer and an attentive watcher of social media. If The-Devonshire-Guinness experience is only incidentally about the drink itself, that has not impeded business. In the run-up to Christmas, the pub was reportedly serving nearly 20,000 pints of the stuff per week. At £6.90 a pint, that would be more than £6.5m per year, if it can keep it up. Stout returns.
Rogers and his team take care over their pints and are rightly proud of their pub. It is not their fault that The Devonshire finds itself at the centre of a Guinness-hype inferno, the like of which the capital has never seen. Before the pub opened towards the end of last year, there was already plenty of nonsense talked about the black stuff, with drinkers competitively claiming various venues as the best: The Auld Shillelagh in Stoke Newington; The Plimsoll, in Finsbury Park; The Toucan, in Soho; The Cow, in Notting Hill; Darby’s, in Battersea. All of a sudden, it felt like London was awash with Guinness Bores, who had previously dedicated their efforts to low-intervention wine or craft beer. The new iteration came with obsessive commentary about temperature, cleanliness of lines, the mix of nitrogen and oxygen used to propel the liquid into the glass. Drinkers who, in a blind tasting, could hardly tell the difference between IPA and lager, or red and white wine, suddenly had palates of such hair-trigger sensitivity that they would travel and queue for the right Guinness.
The dining room at The Devonshire
It is a remarkable feat of brand endurance, which was justly rewarded with Brand of the Year, at Marketing Week Awards. With the way people talk about Guinness in 2024, you would think it was some undiscovered natural wine or laboratory invention, rather than a multi-billion-pound consumer brand that has been going since 1759 and is currently owned by Diageo, a conglomerate. Other drinks – Sprite, or Budweiser, or Tropicana – might be popular, but are hardly thought of as cool. Nobody fetishises Heineken. Yet, Guinness has pulled off a remarkable trick: somehow becoming cool, despite its ubiquity. The advertising guru Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy, uses the phrase “benign bullshit” to describe aspects of a product that are adjacent to the core experience, but, nevertheless, are valued by the consumer. Wine is the great example of this. No matter if they have the palate of a corkboard, wine drinkers enjoy talking about provenance and age and terroir and chateaux and notes and finishes. They are prepared to pay handsomely for those aspects. It is part of the fun.
A pint of Guinness, served at The Devonshire
Other products have followed suit. Never mind a shot of drugs to wake you up in the morning, coffee has become mingled with talk of origins and roasting levels and pour-overs. Guinness has had the same treatment. Partly it is thanks to the colour. In a visual age, Guinness’s black-and-white contrast is distinctive. You cannot tell what type of lager you are looking at by sight alone; Guinness is instantly recognisable. No matter if taste is divisive at best. Then there is the history. Somehow, Guinness has managed to associate the drink with all of Ireland’s other best exports: music, poetry, fast horses. The mythology around the two-part pour, another tenet of Guinness Boredom, marks the drinker out as the kind of guy or girl who goes against the grain. A free-thinker, an unhurried artiste. Guinness ads have long leaned into this, but its message has become more pronounced the more frenetic the rest of life seems. We now have the spectacle of thousands of these countercultural libertines, all queuing in Piccadilly Circus for the same stuff, so they can post a picture proving they have done their commercial duty.
Which leads us to the hype itself. There is a risk of overthinking this all. A generous interpretation of Guinness might be that social media is a gigantic extension of the round system, a kind of national or even international version of “the same for me”, which comes from a spirit of harmless fun. A more cynical view is that the genius of all great marketing is to make it feel like desire has bloomed spontaneously in the breast of the consumer. Sure, we all know the adverts, but we are all too intelligent to have been tricked into liking Guinness. It is simply a great-tasting drink and we are canny to seek out the best pints of it. I know which I think is right. There is gold in the black stuff.
This feature was taken from our Spring 2024 issue. Read more about it here.
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