Your intrepid liquor reporter is accustomed to a great many things. The sun rises in the east every morning. Alberta has one final snowstorm every May long weekend. And Guinness is always dark and creamy.
Take heed gentle reader, for this may well forbode the end of days. Plagues of locusts o’er the land, dogs and cats sleeping together, that sort of thing. I refer, of course, to the new Guinness Blonde American Lager.
It all started in 1759, when Arthur Guinness took out a 9000 year lease on a disused brewery in Dublin, for the princely annual sum of £45.
There have been a few ownership changes over the centuries, and Guinness is now fully owned by Diageo, the world’s largest drinks company.
Everything was fine for the first 250 years or so, with a steady stream of delicious Guinness Irish Stout from the taps of pubs the world over. Even today, all the Guinness produced for the UK and North American markets is still produced at the original brewery in Dublin.
Back in the days before the craft beer revolution, beer nerds like your humble narrator would flock to the Guinness on tap at the local watering hole, in no small part because the other options were tasteless fizzy macrobrews.
Those jet-black pints with their creamy white heads were a secret symbol that beer nerds used to recognize each other across the crowded bars and beer halls, and were regularly used as a subtle mating call to attract a lad or lassie with obviously superior tastes than the unwashed masses that were swilling their Bud Light in the singles bar.
However, with the beer cognoscenti wrapping their lips around more and more locally brewed craft beers, Guinness is finding itself in the unenviable position of being too crafty for the mainstream macrobrew drinkers, but not crafty enough for the beer nerds.
Your humble narrator shares the blame for the ongoing slow decline in Guinness sales, as I have replaced my purchases in the Stout beer category with craftier local versions, including the Alberta Crude Oatmeal Stout from Calgary’s Wild Rose Brewery, or the Dandy in the Underworld Oyster Stout, from Calgary’s newest nanobrewery, the Dandy Brewing Company, which is now available at your local well-stocked booze merchant.
Guinness is reaching out to a new generation of beer drinkers, by branching out into different beer styles, using what they call their Discovery Series. The Discovery Series will change out the beer style once or twice a year, with the goal of introducing new drinkers to the Guinness family.
The first entry in the Discovery Series is the Guinness Blonde American Lager, which is as unlike Guinness Irish Stout as a beer can be.
While the new Blonde beer still uses the traditional Irish yeast from Dublin, Williamette hops from Oregon are used for bittering, and the American pale barley malts make for a lightly toasted golden lager with a biscuity aftertaste.
The beer is brewed in Pennsylvania by the well-established City Brewing, who does contract brewing for several other breweries in addition to Guinness.
This contract brewing strategy is not uncommon, with many international brewers opting to save on the significant transportation costs by having their own special recipe cooked up in a far-off brewery. Even cutthroat competitors will sometimes enter into reciprocity agreements to brew each others beers in distant markets, just because so much of the retail cost of beer is tied up in transportation.
Purists who think that pale fizzy macrobrews should not be brewed in the same tanks as a beer with the pedigree of Guinness are sure to be disappointed, but those are the same purists that are two-timing Guinness with younger and craftier examples of the Stout beer style, which has contributed to the slow sales decline that Guinness is trying to reverse.
To help you, the faithful reader, your intrepid liquor reporter dutifully picked up a six-pack of the Guinness Blonde American Lager at my local booze merchant.
The beer pours a clear goldenrod into the glass, with a bright white head of foam. The flavours are of toasted bread from the malts, and a bit of fruity sweetness from the yeast. The hops are quite mild, so macrobrew drinkers will not be scared off by the bitterness. All in all, a serviceable lager that any drinker of mainstream brands like Labatt or Stella Artois will enjoy. Pick up a bottle and see for yourself!
