Simply catch the name – Guinness – and an image rises before the imagination: that coal-black silhouette, black as midnight on a moonless night, crowned with a plush band of cream.
I’m sitting at a small table on the top floor of the Brazen Head Pub in Toronto’s Liberty Village, enjoying a pint of Guinness. There it is: cool, rich and resplendent, as seductive as nectar, luscious and piquant and a deep, striking … blonde. Ah yes. Crisp. Hoppy. It tastes of apricot and peach.
But now hang on a minute. A pint of Guinness?
But this isn’t Guinness as it’s ordinarily known. I happen to be drinking a pint of what’s called Hop House 13, a new lager developed at the St. James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin and introduced to Canadian pubs earlier this month. It is indeed nothing at all like Guinness, but Guinness would like you to get to know its name.
Beth Carey, a Guinness brand ambassador born in Nova Scotia and based in Dublin, where she organizes private tours of the Guinness Storehouse, has been in the brewery’s employ for nearly a decade and has known it was her destiny for even longer. In fact she moved to Ireland with the dream in mind. “I told everyone at my going away party that I was going to work for Guinness someday,” she told me. And soon she did – mopping floors and pouring pints, at first, and now overseeing the Storehouse’s “connoisseur experience” tours. She’s returned to her native __canada to help facilitate the Hop House launch. “This is a great beer and not your typical lager,” she tells me, the faintest trace of adopted brogue in her voice. “It has character. It’s a great beer.”
That’s true: it’s a fine beer. But it also isn’t Guinness. This, of course, poses certain conceptual problems for the company. Namely: how does a brand totally synonymous with an unmistakable look and taste begin to market another? How does Guinness sell a Guinness that isn’t Guinness?
Guinness – the proper stuff – was introduced to the beer-drinking world some 257 years ago. It is old – older than Canada. And one effect of that history is the generation and fortification of a brand identity stronger than just about any other in existence, not only in the realm of spirits. Everyone over the legal drinking age, and quite a few under it besides, has a clear idea of what Guinness looks and tastes like. Companies crave with desperation a character so well-defined. As beverages go, Guinness is roughly as distinctive as orange juice or milk.
Beth concedes this is a problem. “Guinness is it. It’s iconically it,” she says. “We have a huge amount of pride about that — but it’s also a challenge to overcome. A lager is not what you’d expect when you hear Guinness.” On the other hand, Beth is quick to point out, Guinness Draught seemed novel when it was unveiled more than 50 years ago; in Ireland there were practically riots in the street. Nobody wanted the drink they were so passionate about to be fussed around with. Now Guinness Draught is the best-selling variety of Guinness in the world.
Still, Guinness Draught – and for that matter Guinness Foreign Extra, which prevails in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean – is not exactly a radical change. It still tastes more or less like Guinness. It’s still a robust stout. It’s still black. The Hop House 13, on the other hand, will seem as unlike its sister beer as a gin martini. It will be undoubtedly difficult for your average beer-drinker to get over this basic cognitive dissonance. Guinness, immediately and immutably, is that heavy inky ebony stuff that doesn’t look or taste like any other beer. How can it be a crisp hoppy lager that tastes of apricot and peach too?
Conventional wisdom suggests that the success Guinness presently enjoys – its achievement as virtually the most recognizable beer in the world – could only be jeopardized by meddling. One thinks, of course, of New Coke: the most notorious branding disaster in the history of corporate America and an ongoing object lesson in the value of retaining rather than changing a brand. But remember too that introduction of Diet Coke had its own rather seismic consequences for the Coca-Cola Company: it diluted Coke’s existing constituency, drawing millions of calorie-conscious cola-drinkers away from the core product. Even the successful launch of an ancillary product can be cataclysmic.
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But Beth doesn’t share this concern. The arrival of Hop House isn’t the product of focus-group research or any underlying need to shake up the brand. It’s just in the Guinness nature, Beth says, to try new things. “There were 300 breweries in Ireland in the era of Arthur Guinness,” she explains. “There were 10 other breweries on his street alone. And everyone was brewing ale. He took a risk and started to brew a style of beer that nobody was doing in the country. They thought he was crazy. But it’s because he wasn’t afraid to be creative and innovative that we’re even here today.”
That spirit of innovation – despite the fact that Guinness itself, more than 250 years old, continues to strive unchanged – is the company’s very philosophy. “That’s our passion,” she tells me, finishing a pint. “There will be no end to change.”
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