Guinness

I was dreading this moment for a long time. The truth is that I am still pretty much undecided about Guinness, but it is such as big name and I still drink it often enough that I need to include it in my beer blog. So, I used to hate it. But then, on NAM 2003, we went to Dublin, my entire PhD class and I had time of my life crawling between Dublin pubs getting wasted on Guinness. Plus, we visited the Guinness brewery cum museum: it is a place of perfect marketing, same as all Guinness adds, where you go through 5 floors of history and making of Guinness and you can smell hops and touch malt and learn about a small dose of copyrighted yeast that the director keeps in his safe in case the brewery yeast receives a deadly infection and so on and so on and at the end of this journey, one ends up at the top of the building, in the bar with magnificent views over Dublin. And then they serve you a complimentary pint of Guinness and by then there is now way anybody wouldn't be convinced that Guinness is indeed drink of angels... And so I still like it, but not sure whether I appreciate it as a beer of simply because I connect it to NAM 2003... At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.