Guinness

Product name and meaning.

Guinness Draught, Irish Dry Stout Beer in Bottle with 4.2% of alcohol, named “Guinness” after the name of its first brewer “Arthur Guinness”, born in 1725, son of Richard and Elizabeth Guinness.

History of the inventor or owner of the product.

Arthur Guinness was an Irish brewer and the founder of the Guinness brewery business and family; at the age of 27 his godfather Arthur Price left him £100 in his will, he invested that money and by 1755 he already had a brewery in Leixlip, 17km away from Dublin, in 1759 he went to the city to set his own business up. He took a 10,000 year lease on a 4 acre brewery on St. James Gate for an annual rent of £45.

By 1767 he was the master of the Dublin Corporation of Brewers. His first actual sales of porter were listed on tax data from 1778, and it seems that other Dublin brewers had experimented in brewing porter beer from the 1760s. His major achievement was in expanding his brewery in 1797–99. Thereafter he brewed only porter and employed members of the Purser family who had brewed porter in London from the 1770s. The Pursers became partners in the brewery for most of the 19th century. By his death in 1803 the annual brewery output was over 20,000 barrels. Subsequently Arthur and/or his beer was nicknamed "Uncle Arthur" in Dublin.

The grandson of the original Arthur Guinness, Sir Benjamin Guinness, was Lord Mayor of Dublin and was created a baronet in 1867, only to die the next year. His eldest son Arthur, Baron Ardilaun (1840–1915), sold control of the brewery to Sir Benjamin's third son Edward (1847–1927), who became 1st Earl of Iveagh. Iveagh launched the company on the London Stock Exchange in 1886. Up until then the only other partners outside of the Guinness family were members of the Purser family who helped run the brewery throughout most of the nineteenth century. He, his son & great-grandson, the 2nd and 3rd Earls, chaired the Guinness company until the 3rd earl's death in 1992....