Guinness Brewery - History

History

Arthur Guinness started brewing ales in Leixlip, County Kildare, and then from 1759 at the St. James's Gate Brewery in Dublin. On 31 December he signed a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery. However, the lease is not valid in the modern day, because the brewery has expanded beyond the original 4-acre site, and consequently bought out the property.

Ten years after establishment, on 19 May 1769 Guinness exported his ale for the first time, when six and a half barrels were shipped to England. The business expanded by adopting steam power and further exporting to the English market. On the death of Benjamin Guinness in 1868 the business was worth over £1m., and the brewery site had grown from about 1 acre to over 64 acres. In 1886 his son Edward sold 65% of the business by a public offering on the London Stock Exchange for £6m.

The company pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym "Student" for techniques developed for Guinness, particularly Student's t-distribution and the even more commonly known Student's t-test.

Because of the Irish Free State's "Control of Manufactures Act" in 1932, the company moved its headquarters to London later that year. Guinness brewed its last porter in 1974.

In 1983 a non-family chief executive Ernest Saunders was appointed and arranged the reverse takeover of the leading Scotch whisky producer Distillers in 1986. Saunders was then asked to resign following revelations that the Guinness stock price had probably been illegally manipulated (see Guinness share-trading fraud). As Distillers was worth more than Guinness plc, the Guinness family shareholding in the merged company went below 10%, and today no member of the family sits on the board. Guinness acquired the Distillers Company in 1986.

The company merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo plc, capitalised in 2006 at about 40 billion euros. Although not officially fully taking over, the Guinness family still owns 51% of the brewery. The Guinness brewery in Park Royal, London closed in 2005. The production of all Guinness sold in the UK and Ireland was switched to St. James's Gate Brewery Dublin.