Guinnish

St Patrick’s Day is celebrated around the world on 17 March and Ireland’s greatest liquid export gets all the attention. 100 million glasses of Guinness are poured every day, according to Diageo, which is 1.8 billion pints a year. I imagine this increases by a fair margin on this famous feast day.

I love Guinness. I really do. It’s a beer that is not only nostalgic for me - something that I drank religiously when I was younger - but one that I truly and wholly bought into the brand of. 

I loved their television ads in the nineties and noughties as well as their vintage ads that decorated so many pubs. I loved the harp, the toucan and most of their slogans. They were a giant with an interesting and sometimes complex, controversial history, but I was proud to drink it. That’s pretty weird, but that’s the power of its brand. 

Then came Extra Cold, which just isn’t right… And now it’s all “sinking G’s” and “splitting the G” and all that. It moves with the times and I guess I’m stuck in the past.

I’m a fan of their closest competitors too - I will almost always have a Murphy’s if I see it on a tap, which is unfortunately rare where I live. And even rarer is a Beamish, but every now and again a bar surprises you. I was super surprised to find an O’Hara’s in the brilliant The Brick bar in Brighton which is run by Mark and Pete of The Evening Star fame. 

After years of drinking cheap fizzy lager when I was much younger, I couldn’t take it any more. I went to the darkside and never really moved off it until I found decent craft beer - particularly pale ales, which are now my go-to. I still dabble in the dark stuff, especially when the six nations is on and me and a few friends watch the games with a constant stream of stout. It just feels right. It’s also a great hair-of-the-dog beer for me.

Guinness was sold in our pub, the Hand in Hand for years; many years before we bought the place. There were regular customers that came in to drink only Guinness. The team there look after all the lines like attentive beer nurses, and it’s a busy little place, so the beer always tastes great.

We’re a brewery that serves our own pubs, so it was inevitable that we’d one day try to make our own version of an Irish Dry Stout. Our own Nitro Stout. 

Otto was born. 

Otto is a sessionable 4%, vegan friendly, flavour packed dry stout. Brewed with a base of pale malt, oats and flaked barley, a variety of roasted grains. The roasted grains bring notes of toasted bread crust, raisin, molasses, bitter cocoa and gently acidic coffee, with the oats and flaked barley providing a full mouthfeel. This beer finishes dry, with a gentle but lasting bitterness and another wave of dark chocolate and roastiness.

I prefer Otto to Guinness. Guinness now tastes, to me, like a mass produced stout. It is a mass produced stout, of course. It still tastes great. But it’s broader. I guess to appeal to a broader audience. It can’t have too many other subtle or strong flavours popping out otherwise it can become divisive, limiting their market. So I guess something like Otto could be a bit divisive as it has more flavour, and Guinness lovers may not love those extra flavours. But I do. And a lot of people do. Otto has more flavour.

A few of our favourite trade customers have permanent lines of Otto on their bars - they too have taken a leap of faith away from the dark beer giant. 

I think Guinness is like a gateway stout. It can get you into the darkside if you wouldn’t normally go for something like that. The many times I’ve stood at a bar and everything is disappointing or generic or just lagers - stuff that I don’t drink or don’t want to drink, I’m always thankful that Guinness is there. I wonder if a lot of people start their journey into dark beers this way.

I was in the Hand in Hand the other day and a group of three friendly lads came in. One guy immediately said “Guinness please”, to which our bar-keep Joel replied, “we make all our own beers here, including our own dry, nitro stout. Otto. It’s great, I prefer it, actually. Would you like to try it?” 

The man was stunned. He didn’t know what to say. The other two ordered pales. The dark beer fan was silent. He didn’t know what to do. I could see him thinking ‘No Guinness?!!!’ Eventually, “can I try some of yours?” he said to his friend with the pale. He tried it. “Yeah I’ll have one of those too please”. He ordered a pale. “You don’t want to try the stout?” he was offered again. “No thanks.”

It’s incredible. He wouldn’t even try it. Not even a sip. That’s the power of the harp. So embedded is he into the brand that I imagine he felt like some kind of traitor for even flirting with an alternative.

If this is like you, Dave of Brighton Beer Blog has done a great job finding the best pint of Guinness in Brighton and Hove, and gives a run through of what makes a great pint of Guinness. Check it out here.

I went on a mission with Dave, alongside Gary Sillence, the founder of Brighton Bier (which was born in the Hand in Hand), and Brighton food and drink legend Maria, who has just opened a deli and wine bar in Brighton called Meat. Bread. Wine. 

The mission: to find the best Guinness alternatives in Brighton ahead of St. Patrick’s Day. 

This wasn’t about finding great stouts - there are plenty of them. This was specifically about finding that perfect dark and creamy, sessionable, dry, nitro stout that you would happily drink instead of Guinness. It was about finding something Guinnish. 

Dave and I started on the Otto at the Hand in Hand, naturally, before stopping off for a quick perfect Guinness at the Heart and Hand. Next was a couple of outliers on this quest as we waited for Gary and Maria at The Evening Star - halves of Abyss’s 5% Cacao Stout, It Came From God, and Siren’s 6.5% Nitro Breakfast Stout, Broken Dream. Not compatible with our mission, but very, very compatible with us.

Next it was another excellent Guinness at the Railway Bell, which boasts the cheapest Guinness in Brighton. We then taxi’d across town to the Maris and Otter, a Harvey’s pub - not that you’d know it - for Camden Town's 4% Camden Stout. I think we were all taken aback by this one. It was incredible. Beautiful, creamy, dry. A little more flavour than a Guinness, but a banger. I would say this is actually their best beer! We discussed, for a moment, staying and just drinking that for the night. But the mission was on.

A short walk to The Brick next for a pint of the 4.3% O’Hara’s Irish Stout. This is a great pint of the dark stuff, and a strong competitor, but the slight tang of liquorice in there drops it down the list for me. Mainly because I’m not keen on liquorice. But I imagine I’d get over that quickly if it was all that was available.

A quick half of very good Guinness at the Royal Sovereign on the same street, before heading to one of the best craft beer pubs in the world, The Hole in The Wall. I love this pub, nestled in a backstreet behind the seafront hotels. Here, we had two pints of Anspach and Hobday’s 4.3% London Black. They call this ‘The True Craft Alternative to Big Beer Macro Stouts’. I think they’re the closest to that alongside Camden Town’s Stout. Those were the two winners for me.

Apart from Otto. Of course. But I’m biassed. I’d say that Otto isn’t super close to the Guinness taste like the two winners, but I do prefer the flavour. To be fair, I’d have any of those instead of Guinness. Or Guinness. They're all great! 

I would say that (if memory serves me correctly), they were all served a bit too cold. Maybe not the Camden, nor the Guinness in the Heart and Hand. But that’s something to think about. They shouldn’t be too cold.

Anyway, needless to say, there are now murmurs of the inaugural Guinnish event, where we’ll line these all up together and get the public testing, debating and voting. Probably at the Hand in Hand, maybe on National Stout day in November. We’ve got to make it happen, so I’ll work on this with the Guinnish crew. Keep your eyes on our socials for that.

We make other stouts too - usually as part of our seasonals or specials offering. A 6.2% breakfast stout called Ayyy. A 9.2% imperial stout called Sid (Staggering in the Dark), which we also did a 10.2% barrel-aged version of (did you hear the BBC radio documentary about this beer's companion night?). Chop is our 5% oatmeal stout. We once made a 10% Belgium imperial stout called Talpa that was aged with Tuaca-soaked French oak. 

We also make porters - again, as part of our seasonal or specials offering. Tamper is our 5.2% coffee porter. We once made a 5% chocolate orange fudge porter, called Hatch, which used Head Brewer Kate's brother’s The Fudge Patch vegan fudge.

Another interesting dark beer we made was a 4.8% Schwartzbier called Black Rock, named after a location in Brighton where coal used to be delivered by boat, turning the rocks black. This was a lager, but had the distinctive roasty flavour of a stout. It spangled my head a bit, but it was lovely.

Anyway, I thought I’d write something about Guinness and our Otto ahead of St Patrick’s Day. Guinness is one of those drinks that has become so ingrained in our society, it’s almost got genericide status. It’ll become a verb one day, like Google or Hoover. Maybe not, but it’s everywhere. I can't think of a country I’ve been to where Guinness hasn’t been available in one form or another. 

I love it. Even if I love Otto a bit more now.