Flour Power

251 years ago today, Arthur Guinness signed the lease on what would become the Guinness brewery. It is, of course, a date to celebrate.

How? By drinking Guinness, of course!

To Arthur!

Guinness, the brand that is a synonym of “the black stuff”, is entering the black lager market with a new product – Guinness Black Lager.

Pitched at a younger market, the drink will be served up in 330ml bottles and supported by a new advertising and marketing campaign. It is being trialled in Northern Ireland and will go on sale at selected pubs and off-licences, priced similar to other premium lagers.

It seems like every once in a while Guinness tries to launch a crazy new product, and has failed consistently. Examples of such flops from Dublin’s legendary St James’ Gate brewery include “white Guinness” Breo and Guinness Light. But this time they’re confident this new product will be a success, maybe because of the growing popularity of dark lagers. John Kennedy, Diageo’s managing director, said the new beer had a unique taste which is “an evolution in lager making”.

With this lager, the master brewers of Guinness have built upon 250 years of rich brewing heritage to take lager enjoyment to a new level.

(via Independent.ie)

It’s now more than a month late, but I need to get this one out of the way: on the 15th of January, my Guinness counter hit number 500. It has come a long way since number one, when I first arrived to Ireland.

And since this was more than just another pint, I made sure I drank it in the same pub I had the first one in. And more: I was sitting at the same table. And this took place exactly (give or take a couple of hours) one year after Guinness Pint Number One. Historic, eh?!

“And now what?”, you might ask. Well, now I stop counting. It was fun as a topic of conversation, but the fun was gone when people insisted on telling me how much money I had spent on Guinness.

Now that I’m done with the counting, I also got rid of the counter in the sidebar. I just felt the need to point this out, otherwise people might think I stopped drinking Guinness altogether, which is not the case at all. Rest assured, Guinness people, I’ll keep sending money your way…

132 will mark the next milestone in my Guinness counter. Why? I’ll explain.

As you might remember, I previously mentioned that 1 pint is not equal to half a liter. In fact, it’s something like:

1 Imperial pint = 0.568261485 liters

Now considering that my body weight is approximately 75Kg and that the density of Guinness is the density of water (which I know it isn’t, each beer has a different density based on a variety of factors, but the variation is too small to be relevant for the case at hand) – 1g/cm³ - let us make the following calculation:

75 / 0.568261485 = 131.98

What this means is, by the time I finish my Guinness pint number 132, I’ll have drunk my own body weight in Guinness! When presented this way, it sounds a little bit overwhelming.

Anyway, judging from last weekend, I guess I’ll get to that number quite soon… And then I’ll probably stop counting. Or I’ll just remove the counter, so that people don’t think of me the drunk-bastard-that-likes-to-show-it-off-on-his-crappy-blog.

I just hope I can get the milestone glass this time.

2 months, 18 days, 5 hours and some minutes after I arrived in Galway, I drank my one hundreth pint of Guinness!

What? Don’t give me that look! It’s not like I was binge drinking a lot to get to that number. It’s just that Guinness goes down so easily that most of the nights out I get to number 4 without even noticing it. For me, it’s much easier to drink than the lager I always had before coming here, which is much more common in Portugal.

And the big One Oh Oh was drank on the 2nd of April, which is also my birthday. Makes it a historic pint, doesn’t it? Well, maybe not, but whatever. Here’s the (very artistic) photo of Pint Number 100:

I only regret not being able to keep Glass Number 100 (it was gone from the poor hiding place by the time I was on the way back home). It would go right next to Glass Number 50 and Glass Number 69 (yeah, I know… typical… but I had to keep it…).

Next milestone will happen in roughly 30 pints, but I’ll have to do some math to get the exact number