Okay, so it’s Guinness this time. I know, I know. Guinness. First, I want to be clear about this – I think Guinness is a fine beer. There is something pretty cool that they do with their beer to get that perfect foamy head, and the neat bubbling action going on with the Nitrogen bubbles when you pour it into a glass, that’s just straight up cool. Since I actually went and bought a pack of Guinness to do this review, I’ll soon update their official PPOz rating to be 134 (I got a 4-pack of 14.9oz cans for 7.99 at the grocery store).
I’m not going to post any Guinness graphics for two reasons: 1) It’s Guinness, and you know damn well what it looks like - they pay for ads to be beamed into your head at night, and 2) unlike most of the other contestants, Guinness is a really, really big brewing company, and will be a tad harder to get in nice, personal contact with. I could just steal some graphics from their site, but I have the feeling that would turn out badly for me, as this would (presumably) trigger an army of drunk leprechauns to descend upon my apartment in a no-holds-barred death match, during which they would hurl their tiny bodies upon me while pelting me with unbelievably shiny gold pieces and stuffing rainbows into orifices I’d rather they left alone. (The preferred orifice for rainbow-stuffing is clearly the nose, but leprechauns can’t reach that high.) Although… I am curious in a GTA-sort of way about how many of the little bastards I could take with me before they reduced me to a gold-stuffed piñata after painting me green and removing all the icky bits.
Leprechaun death-matches aside, Guinness is a nice beer. You could do far, far worse for a beer that is distributed to every bar on Earth by fanatical legions of storm troopers and brewed in an Irish Death Star (it’s like the Empire’s, but with a much wobblier orbit and fiddle music).
All niceties behind us now, we can get to the meat of this review: this beer isn’t going very far in this tournament. I’ll be shocked if it comes close to beating Schafly Reserve. It’s not Guinness’s fault – they make a fantastic mass-marketed beer that can appeal to millions of people around the world. Such a beer needs to have a less powerful taste than the “extreme” beers it’s up against here. It’s far and away the lowest ABV at 4.2% (a number that is maddeningly absent from their cans – I had to do some actual internet research to find it), and the color is incredibly light for this group. Incidentally, for the beer n00bs, that should give you an idea of what kind of stouts we’re drinking here – Guinness has a very, very light coloring for this tournament. The taste is similarly light, though pleasant. There is a very nice head on a pint of Guinness, though, that they can be justifiably proud of; it does make the experience of drinking one better. It’s a very smooth beer, almost no stinginess in the mouthfeel, but it doesn’t coat your tongue like some of the heavier beers it’s up against.
The real reason I elected to include it in this tournament is because I felt it was needed for a sense of legitimacy. There should be a beer that everybody is at least passingly familiar with, if only to stomp out the idea of “Yeah, that tournament might have shown who was the best of the little beers, but throw Guinness in there and it’s not even a competition anymore.” This mentality has been shockingly common among people (non-beer-knurds) to whom I’ve described the tournament. Guinness is way, way, better than Bud Light, so clearly it must be the best beer out there (their reasoning, as best I can tell). Well, I agree with your premise, good hypothetical sir, but I can’t say that the implication holds.
Most of the beers in this tourney are American craft brews – and I think they could easily be among the best in the world. American beers get a bad rap mainly from the Macros, the T&A beers, which are sadly just about the only ones we export.
I’ve got to do a European tour of craft breweries to see how they stack up; I certainly hope that the imports we can get over here aren’t the best of the bunch or else the ancestral home of beer has been left far, far behind in beer making talent, with only a handful of exceptions, particularly when it comes to truly dark beers. The trappists still rule the roost when it comes to the classic Belgian ales, but there are plenty of North American brewers that are right on their heels (and in some cases ahead – I’d take an Allagash Dubbel over a Westmalle or an Orval any day).
Anyhow – this post has gone on long enough and gotten far, far away from its original purpose. Guinness. Decent beer, funny commercials and all, but not going to make any noise in the Tournament of Stouts. Hey – only 125 calories though – so it’s kind of a diet beer for me. I’m down.
Duff out.
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