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Zombie thread, coming through!

I was at a talk last week by the Guinness archivist about their collections and services. I asked her afterwards about the defunct breweries that Guinness took over. She said in most cases Guinness didn't buy the company, just the site, so would never have received the company records. In the case of Macardle Moore, Diageo donated the papers to Louth County archives so they're there if anyone wants to look at them. But things like the pre-Guinness records of Great Northern in Dundalk or O'Connell's in Dublin were never part of their collection.

She denied that Guinness ever kept an equivalent of the Whitbread Gravity Book: the vital statistics of competitors' beers. I find that a wee bit hard to believe, but there you go. Mind you, 45% of the collection is still uncatalogued so it might be in there somewhere among the 3000 ledgers.

The big thing they do is genealogy work as they have the full personnel records back to about 1880. Largely because of this they operate a 30 year rule on all documents, so you might be able to get the recipe for Guinness Lite but will have to wait until 2027 for Dark Angel Lager <!-- s:P --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_razz.gif" alt="" title="Razz" /><!-- s:P --> Some documents older than 30 years are still classified as commercially sensitive and aren't made available.

Anyway, if you're interested in this sort of thing they are open to the public by appointment. The website is here[/url:1quwuu5w].

Maybe we need to send Ron Pattinson over to them!

I had high hopes of getting the drop on Ron for Irish brewing records, but I think most of what can be gleaned from the material about Guinness itself is already published in David Hughes's [i:1ikenmse]A Bottle of Guinness Please[/i:1ikenmse] which Ron has quoted extensively in his blog.

Mind you, the Beamish and Murphy's archives are both available in different archives in Cork. There's potentially lots of interesting stuff in there.

This thread doesn't want to die! <!-- s:D --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_biggrin.gif" alt="" title="Very Happy" /><!-- s:D -->

My mouse pointer is hovering over the "Purchase Order" button on Amazon, ready to buy "A bottle of Guinness, please"?

Is it still thought by many on here to be the definitive work on Guinness? How much detail is there on Guinness' brewing process? Or is it just about the advertising etc.?

Thanks all.

I only know it through Ron, but it does seem to have a lot of hard facts from the Guinness logs and definitely isn't just about the brand. However, I get the impression that it's written and researched very much from a British angle and that the twentieth century data are much more about Park Royal rather than James's Gate.

Hmm, might not be what I'm looking for then..

Any alternatives you'd recommend?