Guinness Factory

On Saturday some friends and I went to the Guinness Factory. It was great, but a little bit of a let down because I had my expectations set too high. All the guidebooks and the people in Dublin and at the NUIM said that it was a must see. But it still was really neat. It was a self led tour with arrows on the floor that took you up 7 levels. The shape of the floors on each level got wider as it went up to be in the shape of a Guinness glass. It was definitely artsy and a really long tour with lots of walking. Do you know what the 4 ingredients of Guinness are? They are barley, hops, water, and yeast (I think yeast, I may be wrong. This just shows how much I learned from the factory!). We learned about the marketing of the beer, the making, and the transporting of it. The first picture is of the huge cylinders that actually contain millions of gallons of beer. I do not know what stage of the process this is, but at some point it travels through pipes across the road to another tank. The process to make Guinness is really, really, really, long and complicated. There are many steps and heating and cooling and transferring it to another holding tank. I did not really care for that part of the tour. The next picture is of the various bottles that Guinness came in over the years. After that is a pile of barrels that carried all sorts of things in them including Guinness. I watched a really cool video showing how the barrels (properly called casks) were made. As I was watching this, I thought that I would hate to be a barrel maker because it was such a long and complicated process. They are made entirely out of planks of wood. There is no sealant. The forearms on these men are ridiculous! The veins were sticking out of them. To make a barrel, you just shave some wood into the shape you want, but when electrical saws were not invented, they had to take the pieces of wood and hit it with a large blade to make it the correct shape. The force taken to do that is huge. To my surprise, being a barrel maker is actually a very prestigious job, due to the amount of skill involved. The training is seven years! Once you get to the seven years, and the master of the barrel making studio thinks that you are ready, you go through an initiation process, where you make your first barrel all by yourself and then you are put into it along with things found around the studio like bits of wood, shavings, and some Guinness. The masters then roll you down the street until they think that you have had enough. Luckily, for all of that work, the barrels last for about 10 years before they need repair. They were only used for about 100 years before the steel kegs came along which were much cheaper and sturdier.
The next picture is of a waterfall in the factory showing the water that comes from the Wicklow Mountains, south of the city, "Only the purest water can go into making Guinness."
Finally we have a view from below of a giant old barrel that was used to hold the beer in some part of the process of making it. Now they use the steel barrels shown in the first picture.