Pour Your Own Pint at the Guinness Storehouse

Guinness seems to be a bit like Marmite…people love it or hate it. 

I can proudly say I’m one of the former. I LOVE Guinness and will happily drink it instead of an ordinary beer! The meal in a glass has that perfect consistency for me- not too fizzy, and it has a nice creamy top. I love marmite too!

To be in the Guinness Storehouse on St.Patrick’s Day was just brilliant. Our 6-day tour of all Ireland was due to finish on St.Patrick’s Day, and our driver made sure that we did all our activities so were able to make it back to Dublin in the morning.

We woke up at our hostel in Annascaul, put our St.Paddy’s day hats on and were on the bus by 7am heading towards Dublin. Our first stop- the Guinness Storehouse for a pint of the black stuff! As part of our Paddyagon tour our entry to the Guinness Storehouse was included, so we didn’t have to worry about buying tickets. Normally an online ticket is €12.96 and a ticket on the door is €14.40.

The Guinness Storehouse is laid out over seven floors centred around an atrium in the shape of a pint glass. If this pint glass atrium was full, it would hold 14.3 million pints of Guinness.

On the ground floor you can see the lease that Arthur Guinness signed for the brewery displayed behind glass in the floor. The lease was for just £45 per year for 9,000 years, which is incredible! You’ll also find a souvenir shop on this floor selling all sorts of Guinness-themed gifts and memorabilia to take home.

Since it was St.Patrick’s Day, Guinness were trying to make St.Patrick’s Day the Friendliest Day of the Year. There were free standing photo booths in the entrance, where you could have your photo taken with a friend and then either upload it to Facebook, or have it sent to your email. By having your photo taken you were pledging to celebrate St.Patrick’s Day with your friends, and the number of pledges were displayed on a big counter.

This is the photo I had taken with Beth, whom I became good friends with on the tour.

As you explore each floor of the Guinness Storehouse, you can learn about the four main ingredients, the brewing process, and the history of the company. You can discover the transportation methods used to transport Guinness across the world, and learn about the skilled craft of the coopers that made the barrels. As you can see below, this barrell says “The largest Vats werte capable of holding about 90,000 gallons- that’s 720,000 pints of Guinness.”

There are also plenty of tasting opportunities as you ascend up to each floor!

One of the things you can do there is Pour Your Own Pint, or you can use your ticket to get a pint of Guinness in the Gravity Bar, which offers 360 degree views of Dublin city. I chose to pour my own pint!

We were divided into groups for entry into the Perfect Pint bar, where this man taught us how to craft the perfect pint of Guinness.

The art to the perfect pint of Guinness is to hold the glass at an angle and pull the handle down towards you. As the glass fills you steadily straighten it, until the liquid  reaches the bottom of the harp on the glass. You then leave it to stand and let it settle for a couple of minutes. To finish the pint off, you push the lever away from you and fill the glass up to the top. Et voila!

I got a nice little certificate to say I can pour the perfect pint of Guinness too!

We then went up to the Gravity Bar to join the rest of the group amongst the St.Patrick’s Day partygoers. There was a sea of green hats, and everyone was in really good spirits. St.Paddy’s Day really is the friendliest day of the year!

Whilst I love Guinness, a lot of the people in my group didn’t like the taste of it, which meant there were lots of half-drunk pints to finish- more for me then!

In my opinion, the Guinness Storehouse is the ideal place to go on St.Paddy’s day. The atmosphere is fun and welcoming, and although it was busy, it wasn’t too overcrowded at this time of the day because everyone was at the parade. I could have easily spent all day in here!