The Spirit World

The James Joyce Irish Pub in Baltimore, Maryland was just around the corner from the hotel I stayed in this last week. It being the closest pub, it was technically my “local” for a week and I did stop in several times late in the day for a pint of Good Guinness. The reason I capitalized the G in Good is that there is a distinction between Good Guinness and regular Guinness. People who drink Guinness regularly and at a variety of pubs know the difference. They will often say that “This pub pours a Good Guinness” and Guinness drinkers will intuitively understand what this means. What makes a Good Guinness different from a regular Guinness is due to two factors: (1) freshness, and (2) proper pouring.

Freshness is a good thing for any beer served out of a tap. Even though kegs are usually protected from the flavor degrading effects of oxygen, because beer is a living system with yeasts that continue to do their work on the residual sugars, the character of a beer will change over time. With Guinness, my impression is that fresh Guinness is Good Guinness, but that alone doesn’t usually elevate a glass of Guinness from regular to Good status.

One of the reasons to go to an honest-to-goodness Irish pub is that you are more likely to encounter a bar tender who is committed to pouring Guinness in the recommended fashion (see my post from last Tuesday). Pouring a proper pint of Guinness takes about two minutes. A good bar tender will make you wait for your Guinness rather than just spraying it into a glass and sliding it in front of you as if they were pouring a Pale Ale. The most obvious difference between a properly and a badly poured Guinness is the thickness of the head. If your Guinness comes to you with an inch or more of foam on top, that’s an indication that your bar tender is rushing it. Does how a Guinness is poured affect the flavor? My theory is that the flavor is independent of how a Guinness is poured, but the mouthfeel—how the beer feels in your mouth, the texture—is different and thus imparts a different initial impression. When tasting a beer, that first sip is crucial in forming your impression. All subsequent sips have a history and your tongue gets used to the flavors and becomes less sensitive to the subtle changes in flavor and texture. So, the first sip or two of a properly poured, fresh Guinness—a Good Guinness—will give a different first impression than hurriedly poured Guinness. By the time you get to the last few drops in your pint glass any characteristics introduced into the beer during the pour have long dissipated.

At the James Joyce Irish Pub I didn’t only drink Guinness, they had a full line of Irish beers on tap including James Joyce Amber Ale. Some pubs have a special beer brewed under contract by a local brewery. This beer will be the pub’s signature beer, the beer that makes it different from all the other beer bars out there, so I usually like to try these beers. Unfortunately, while the Guinness at James Joyce was fresh, the James Joyce Amber Ale was not. The beer was thin bodied and had like malt or hop character and it had that slight sourness to it, the tell-tale sign of having sat in the keg too long.