Arthur Guinness(1725–1803)

Arthur Guinness was born at Celbridge in County Kildare on the twenty-eighth of September 1725, eldest son of Richard Guinness, land steward to Dr Arthur Price, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Cashel. The father was the brewer at the Archbishop's house; the son was raised in the brewhouse and christened by the Archbishop himself. When Price died in 1752 he left Arthur a legacy of one hundred pounds, with which the twenty-seven-year-old took on a small brewery at Leixlip in Kildare and learned the trade on his own account.

In December 1759, in the most consequential commercial gamble in the history of Irish manufacturing, he travelled the ten miles down the Liffey to a derelict four-acre yard at St James's Gate on the western edge of Dublin and signed a lease of nine thousand years at forty-five pounds a year. The figure has the look of a man who intended the brewery to outlast his name; it has duly outlasted it twice over. He cleared the yard, repaired the malthouse and the millpond, and was selling Dublin ale within the year.

Through the 1770s he made the second of the brewery's defining choices. The dark, hop-heavy porter shipped over from London was taking the Dublin trade by force; Guinness, instead of fighting it with Irish ale, set out to brew a porter of his own, heavier, blacker and finished with a longer roast. By 1799 he had stopped brewing ale altogether and committed the whole house to the dark beer that took his name. The St James's Gate porter became, within a generation, the standard against which every other stout in the British Isles was measured.

He fought the duty wars with the Irish Revenue through the 1770s with a temper that became part of the family folklore, defending the Dublin brewers' water rights against the city corporation with a pickaxe in his own hand. He was a founding governor of the Meath Hospital, a treasurer of the Sunday School Society, and a public advocate for Catholic relief at a time when most of his Protestant peers in the city were not. He died at St James's Gate on the twenty-third of January 1803 in his seventy-eighth year, leaving the brewery to his son Arthur Guinness the second and the trade in a condition no Irish manufacturer had managed before.

The St James's Gate brewery passed through four further generations of Guinness brewers, became the largest single brewery in the world by the 1880s, was taken public on the London Stock Exchange in 1886 in the largest IPO of the nineteenth century, and merged in 1997 into Diageo, the world's largest spirits company, the Guinness family retaining a substantial holding. The original 1759 lease is preserved at the brewery; the harp of Brian Boru, which Arthur put on the label in 1862 through his grandson, is on the coinage of the Irish state. The Guinness name in modern commerce, in modern philanthropy and on the pint glass carries the weight of the nine-thousand-year lease the brewer signed at the gate.