Guinness in 1969-bottle caps vs corks

re: Unhygienic? "Nonsense, we sterilize them in boiling water and immediately cork the......" open Guinness bottles filled by a bloke with bare hands working in our dank basement and then having another bloke grab the cork in one bare hand and with the other bare hand grab the bottle by the neck.

(Hey, I'm no germophobe - hell, that's how I bottled homebrew in the 1970s - but I can understand Guinness not being thrilled with it in 1969.)

 

I hitchhiked around Ireland in 1969 and drank a lot of Guinness, both in Dublin and in some very obscure small town and village pubs, mostly draft but some bottles. Don't remember any corked--it was always capped. Also toured the Guinness Brewery (St. James Gate) which was about the size of, and as modern as, the big Milwaukee breweries. I can't imagine why Guinness would allow/authorize this artisanal bottling on the part of pubs (perhaps the pubs liked it because they made more profit per bottle?).

 

Cark? Croun? Wotaboit fookin' drawft?

Seriously, on my 2 trips to Dublin, I only ever saw Guinness on draught.

Then again, I never bloody asked for anything else.

 

Great video! I loved it. I wouldn't consider it a hygenic issue though as much as I'd consider it an oxygenation issue. Capped on foam is the way to go!

 

that entire youtube channel is an amazing gateway into many different aspects of modern Irish history, some very charming and fascinating videos on there (and some pretty weird ones to be fair). i watched that video myself the other day. obviously long before my time, but having grown up in Ireland all my life, all I can say is that I’ve never heard anyone lament about the good old days when Guiness came in corked bottles, i have heard stories however from way back in the day of people complaining about how it got worse when they moved from wooden to steel casks to store the beer in.

 

Try turning on the Closed Caption and you can read about crowned cats, cart bottles, cat buckles, and how they used to caulk the bottles.

Well, Guinness had a long history of independent bottlers*, ex-Guinness brewmaster David Hughes estimates there were 12,000 in the early 20th century and still "several thousand" in the 1950s in his excellent book, A Bottle of Guinness, Please. The book includes correspondence from Guinness officials who had inspected some of these small "bottlers", noting mud floors, no hot water for washing bottles and a bottling cellar with "heavy unpleasant smell of decaying matter". One bottler complained about "losing 40% of his profit" if he had to buy bottled Guinness.

Even after Repeal, Guinness bottled by various bottlers was exported to the US, including from E. & J. Burke, Dog's Head and Bugle.

*Something that had pretty much died out in the US before Prohibition, except for a few isolated and short-lived cases post-Repeal, but many US labels long used the term "Brewed and bottled by..." as a remnant of the change from that procedure. Of course, a form of it was reborn with the recent popularity of bars selling growlers of draught beer, which some craft brewers did not care for.

 

Great video. Pub bottling was one of the reasons Guinness remained bottled conditioned until the 1990s.

Bottle-conditioned Guinness - even with a "tin top" - was one of the world's greatest beers. A sad, sad loss to beer culture.

If I had one wish, it would be to have bottle-conditioned Guinness Special Export.

 

Independent bottlers of Guinness weren't limited to Ireland. When I lived in Leeds, all the Guinness was bottled by Musgrave and Sagar, a former brewer which continued as a bottler.

 

Yeah, didn't mean to imply they did. The US got some FES bottled by Guinness Exports, Ltd. of Liverpool, Eng., probably post-WWII and some ads for Guinness after Repeal left that bottom portion of the Guinness label blank.

 

Tin top. You mean like Theakston Old Peculiar?