Goodbye, Guinness
I stopped into the Virginia Cafe for a goodbye pint last night.
You may have noticed a subtle change on this site: the Guinness banner that has followed the third paragraph of every post for the past decade has vanished. In a week in which Guinness announced the closure of its Baltimore Open Gate brewery, this is not a major development. But the fortunes of Guinness, its parent company Diageo, and subsidiary projects like sponsoring Beervana are all connected, so perhaps you’ll allow me to sneak my small, private loss into the narrative.
Ten years ago, Guinness signed on as a sponsor of this blog. I want to note here at the outset what a godsend that was for me. It provided reliable annual income that literally allowed me to continue doing freelance writing. (Reuben’s and Breakside joined in for a time, and pFriem remains a sponsor as well; my gratitude for these breweries is just as deep.)
My gratitude extends beyond the financial support. Over their sponsorship, I came to know some of the Guinness folks, locally and in Dublin, and I also treasure those connections. Diageo must be a decent place to work because so many of them have been around a long time. I have made friends with some of these folks, friendships that will long outlast this business relationship. Guinness is part of a $20 billion company, and as such has all the usual pathologies of corporate existence. I nevertheless found it to be a warm, collegial company that seemed worthy of its immense heritage.
But it is a giant corporation, not a family. Diageo is the product of the 1997 merger of Guinness and Grand Metropolitan, a shaggy dog corporation that had holdings in hospitality, food, and drink. Since the merger, Diageo has becoke mainly a spirits business (75% of revenues) with beer as a funny sidecar, accounting for 18%. Guinness has always been an outlier in an increasingly streamlined business, for better and worse.
When Guinness signed on to sponsor this blog, it was a distressed property. The black stuff was in a down cycle, as has happened many times in its 267-year existence. The hottest thing in beer was craft, which cut directly into Guinness’s “not-lager” niche. Starting in the 2010s, it stepped gingerly toward craft, establishing its first Open Gate Brewery on the campus at St. James Gate in Dublin. This was smart from a brewing perspective, it was in tune with the times, and it capitalized on the way craft beer—like Guinness—focused on draft beer and pub experiences.
Sponsoring Beervana and Good Beer Hunting were efforts to remind craft beer drinkers that Guinness should be on their radar. Around the time they started sponsoring this site, Diageo announced plans to open a second Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore. Others followed in Chicago and London. The blueprint was the same for each location: build a gorgeous facility with multiple dining rooms, a brewery, and artifacts from the company’s history that showed tradition and craft did not begin in 1977. They were built to last. Diageo spent $90 million on the Baltimore project and shipped off some of its most precious pieces, including one-half of its second kettle, which greeted visitors as they walked in. Embracing craft beer, a distinctively American expression, made a lot of sense in the twenty-teens.
But then a funny thing happened. Craft beer started taking on water, and Guinness soared. Worse, from Diageo’s perspective, spirits began to decline. In a complete reversal from a decade earlier, spirits were the distressed sector and Guinness was the bright spot. Here’s a look at their major brands from the 2026 annual report:
Guinness: 12% growth
Johnnie Walker: 2%
Smirnoff: -1%
Captain Morgan: -4%
Baileys: -4%
Don Julio: -14%
Crown Royal: -15%
Overall, spirits were down 5% and beer was up 9%.
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it! If you would like to sponsor an award-winning blog, please give me a holler. Beervana is a small operation, but it is a mighty force. I have covered every major trend and event in the beer industry in the past twenty years. I’ve written profiles of people and breweries, described the inner workings of the beer and hops industry, and offered opinions about it all along the way.
In a deteriorating information environment, being able to believe what you find online is harder and harder. I have worked for twenty years to earn your trust, and you can ensure I stay on the beat by supporting Beervana. Contact me if you’d like to hear more.
These results have spurred Diageo, under its new CEO Dave Lewis, to make cuts—none of them delicate. This is apparently characteristic of “Drastic Dave,” a former Tesco CEO who built a reputation for “cost-cutting.” (Corporations believe that euphemism softens the blow, but I wonder how it feels to workers to be called a mere, dispensable “cost”?) Diageo has eliminated nearly 2,000 jobs this year (6.4% of its total workforce). The company plans to cut more than $1 billion more, and the U.S. has been hit especially hard: 36% of the staff at Diageo’s North America headquarters were recently fired as a part of the effort.
Although the line item that includes sponsoring Oregon beer blogs is too small to see with the naked eye, it was obviously not going to survive this carnage, either. Each June for the past ten years, I have sent off a report about Beervana’s highlights and accomplishments, knowing that one day it would not convince them to continue the sponsorship. This year they quietly let it go—but hey, ten years is a great run.
It is a strange irony that the success of Guinness comes at a moment when Diageo is severing connections to the people who helped it thrive—but we live in a time of ironies. You were a wonderful partner, Guinness, and I’ll miss you.