The Search for God and Guinness

by Stephen Mansfield

  The educational benefits were also more generous than most modern corporations provide. Guinness paid for all its employees between the ages of fourteen and thirty to attend technical schools in Dublin and even funded more advanced education for those who were qualified. There was a lending library at the plant, a musical society, and “Workmen’s Rooms”—which were lounges that allowed a hardworking man to read or just to think, to focus his mind on something beyond his labors. There were also classes in wood carving, cage making, fretwork, sketching, photography, cabinet making, handwriting, music, singing, and dancing.

  The generosity of Guinness seemed unlimited. Every year, every employee was paid to take his family into the country for an “Excursion Day.” Train fare was paid and money for food and entertainment was provided. Single men were allowed to take dates and, again, the company paid the bill. On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria, Guinness paid every employee an extra week’s salary.

  To immerse myself in this culture of generosity was a welcome respite from my own times, where greed and unwarranted privilege daily destroyed lives. It was not hard to see that the Guinness story might provide some balance, some tempering and grace, for our own hardened age. And so I was again drawn to the Guinness heritage for the lessons it might offer and for what it might mean for corporations trying to rise from the dust and build on a different model than the one that has led us so astray. This hope, that Guinness might teach us, guided my work—and lightened my heart.

  It was a hope that held me fast to the Guinness tale.

  And then there was the beer.

  I confess that I came to the topic of beer much as an outsider. I had never been a beer drinker and did not consider myself any poorer for my choice. Still, the culture that surrounded beer and the fellowship that it seemed to inspire did attract me and I found myself looking in on the world of beer very much like a little boy with his face pressed against the window of the candy store.

  This began, I imagine, in my youth when my father would come home at the end of the day. He was a U.S. Army officer and each afternoon he would walk into our house, tall and commanding in his uniform, and settle into his ritual of relaxation. His shirt was soon replaced by a sweater, his boots by his stocking feet. If he was in a playful mood, my brother or I would help him take off those boots and wrestling of some sort would usually ensue. Then, it was always the same: from the bedroom where he changed to the kitchen for supplies and then to the recliner to watch the evening news. And there was, too, the beer. Every evening it was a brew in a bottle or a glass and the handfuls of peanuts that my Georgia-bred soldier/father seemed unable to do without.

  I recall watching him as he transformed from warrior to easy-going Dad. There was something about those moments alone with his newspaper and beer that seemed to me a liturgy, a mystery of manhood my father had mastered and that I hoped I would one day understand. It seemed to symbolize all the other moments in my father’s life when beer played a role. Beer seems ever-present in military life and I had watched my parents drink it with friends at the officers’ club and at battalion picnics and after rounds of golf. There was always the teasing and the laughter and the adult conversations that my young ears longed to understand and all of this was associated with the beer. Somehow I knew early on that the presence of beer changes human interaction, that it gentles the soul and brings about a less guarded state. My father was a different man when he drank a beer and not because he consumed very much of it—he never did—but rather because the beer seemed to give him permission to relax, to stand down and find a human connection to those nearby.

  It was likely a passion to invade these mysteries that caused my friends in high school to give themselves to beer in excess. My family had been transferred to Des Moines, Iowa, by then and I was told by knowing friends in my new school that the most prized drink in the world was a concoction called Coors. But it was illegal in our state and so dozens of my friends had begun an underground railroad of beer from nearby states where Coors was legally sold. Our high school keggers and parties flowed thick with the stuff, but I confess that I never made peace with the taste of Coors, so I looked on, again, from without, more intrigued by the culture beer inspired in my father’s world than by the drunken craziness my friends were determined to enjoy.

  Decades passed. I went to college. I pastored. I wrote books. I lectured. I worked in politics. And I took stock of the state of friendship and bonding in my world. By this time home brewing had become a trend and brewery restaurants made an appearance in most every town. But something else had occurred. It was a cultural shift. Perhaps it was a product of the baby boomers growing older or it may have been the twentysomethings doing for beer and alcohol what their older brothers and sisters had done for coffee. Clearly, a beer with a friend—or the boss or the team or the spouse—had become very much the style.

  At my local watering hole in Nashville, the Flying Saucer, this cultural shift was on grand display. I sat with my Diet Coke and watched church boards meet by the hour, each elder with beer in hand. I saw corporate staffers make presentations on notebook computers, interrupted only by a discussion of which beer of the 211 that the Flying Saucer serves would be featured in the second round. And then there were families trying out a Belgian brew and little old ladies giggling away as they ordered the pale ale of the day. Somehow, it seemed that we were trying to become European, that we no longer wrestled with the ethics of alcohol as in ages past but that we were desperate for those pleasant hours that a good beer and friends could sometimes mean.

  This, too, endeared me to Guinness. I thought of the two and a half centuries of life lived with the dark stout in attendance at many a meaningful moment: when the baby was born or the grandfather died, when the son made it through school or the just-wed couple sheepishly locked the bedroom door. People naturally toast these changes with something in their glasses, something that they value and that brings them joy. For more than ten million people every day, that glass is full of Guinness. And their lives are certainly richer for what it can mean and for the friendship and fun they celebrate with those they hold dear.

  And I confess, as an outsider to drinking and beer, I used to think it was all about the buzz, that drinking anything with alcohol was about escaping the present and drifting into a sloshy other world. But now I know something I did not before. Beer is not simply a means of drunkenness nor is it merely a lubricant to grease the skids to sin. Beer, well respected and rightly consumed, can be a gift of God. It is one of his mysteries, which it was his delight to conceal and the glory of kings to search out. And men enjoy it to mark their days and celebrate their moments and stand with their brothers in the face of what life brings.

  So it was all of this—the unfortunate myth of Arthur, my weariness with politics at the center of life, my hope for a more noble corporate world and, yes, my curiosity at the fellowship of human beings and beer—that sent me on this journey. It is a search for heritage, faith, and craft. It is a hope for an impartation from generations past. It is a passion to understand the liturgies of men in concourse with one another.

  It is the search for God and Guinness.

  SOME GUINNESS FACTS

  • More than ten million glasses of Guinness are consumed each day worldwide. This is nearly two billion pints a year.

  • In 1759, Arthur Guinness founded the Guinness brewery in Dublin by signing a lease for the famous property at St. James’s Gate—a lease that gave him rights to that property for nine thousand years!

  • Arthur Guinness founded the first Sunday schools in Ireland, fought against dueling, and chaired the board of a hospital for the poor.

  • It is a myth that the water for brewing Guinness comes from the River Liffey. Most of the water comes from the streams of the Wicklow Mountains, which lie just south of Dublin.

  • A Guinness worker during the 1920s enjoyed full medical and dental care, massage services, reading rooms, subsidized meals, a company-funded pension, subsidies
for funeral expenses, educational benefits, sports facilities, free concerts, lectures and entertainment, and a guaranteed two pints of Guinness beer a day.

  • During World War I, Guinness guaranteed all of its employees who served in uniform that their jobs would be waiting for them when they came home. Guinness also paid half salaries to the family of each man who served.

  • In December of 1939, in the early days of World War II, Guinness gave every soldier serving in the British Army a pint of stout to enjoy with his Christmas dinner.

  • A Guinness chief medical officer, Dr. John Lumsden, personally visited thousands of Dublin homes in 1900 and used what he learned to help the company fight disease, squalor, and ignorance. These efforts also led to the establishment of the Irish version of the Red Cross, for which Dr. Lumsden was knighted by King George V.

  • The widget—the small plastic capsule that allows a can of Guinness to be properly nitrogenated—won the Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement in 1991. In 2005, the British people voted it the greatest invention in the previous forty years.

  • Guinness is now sold in 150 countries. It is brewed in 49 countries.

  • In 2003, scientists at the University of Wisconsin reported that a pint of Guinness a day is good for the human heart.

  • Henry Grattan Guinness, grandson of brewery founder Arthur Guinness, was a Christian leader of such impact that he was ranked with Dwight L. Moody and Charles Spurgeon in his day. He has been called the Billy Graham of the nineteenth century.

  • Henry Guinness, who died in 1910, wrote best-selling books that not only predicted the end of Ottoman control of Jerusalem in 1917 but also the restoration of Israel in 1948.

  • Guinness was known for its care of its employees. One Guinness family member who headed the brewery said, “You cannot make money from people unless you are willing for people to make money from you.”

  • In the 1890s, Rupert Guinness, future head of the brewery, received five million pounds from his father on his wedding day. Shortly after, he moved into a house in the slums and launched a series of programs that served the poor.

  1

  BEFORE THERE

  WAS GUINNESS

  It was William Shakespeare who wrote “what’s past is prologue,” and I have always believed this is true, but you would never have known it from the history classes I was required to take in school. They seemed prologue to nothing. They had little connection to anything that was to come, anything that might be relevant to the meaning of real life. It was the “Age of This” and the “Era of That.” It was dates and dead people, all of it mind-numbingly boring.

  What makes all of those hours in history class worse in retrospect is how much I came to love history later. Like millions of other people in the world, if the surveys are true, I became enthralled with the past as an adult in a way I never could have with the dusty classroom version. History not only contained thrilling adventure from ages gone by, but also an explanation of my times and wisdom for life.

  So when I went in search of the Guinness story, I took Shakespeare’s maxim to heart and probed the history of beer prior to the beginning of Guinness in order to understand the world—and more specifically the world of beer— out of which the tale of Guinness grew. I have to tell you I was stunned. I have a doctorate in history and I have spent years studying the past in preparation for lectures and writing books, but never had I come across the huge role that beer has played through the centuries. So when I began searching for the story of beer in history, I was amazed to find not just a quiet little theme on the back lot of mainstream history, but a story that is woven through the great literature, civilizations, and movements of the human story.

  Let me give you a small example of what I mean. Almost all of us are familiar with the story of the Pilgrims. Every Thanksgiving Americans at least allude to these forefathers and their Mayflower story and, certainly, it is a tale that holds a fascination all its own. But let me retell a portion of it here with a few completely accurate details added that you likely have not heard. You’ll see what I mean when I say beer adds an interesting element to the retelling of the past, that it makes some of the great adventures of old even more endearing and unforgettable.

  Consider this:

  It was the foul New England winter of 1621 and the small band of Englishmen we call the Pilgrims were carving out a life on the barrens of Cape Cod. That they were alive at all was a miracle. Only months before, they had sailed for sixty-six days across a wild Atlantic Ocean that had tossed them about for weeks at a time. There had been deaths and days on end when they were locked in the ’tween deck for safety with screaming and crying and every kind of human waste floating in the bilge at their feet.

  Now that they had put ashore, having signed the covenant declaring they ventured “for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith,” their desperate situation was obvious to all. As their future governor, William Bradford, later wrote, “Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation, they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succour.” They were alone on the edge of a wilderness, trying to complete their “errand into the wilderness” for God.

  So in March of 1621, in this howling, frozen place, they worked to build their shelters against the cold. And they stood guard, for they had noticed the natives who watched at a distance. The Pilgrims had tried to approach them once, but this only frightened the nervous brown men away. The Pilgrims worked with muskets nearby, then, wary of the strange-looking men who gazed at them from the edge of the trees.

  On March 16, a mercifully warmer day than in recent months, this standoff came to an end. Suddenly, a tall, muscular native strode out from the trees and began to approach. The Pilgrims quickly took their muskets in hand. They were startled, for the man coming toward them was an unsettling sight. He was nearly naked—“stark naked,” they later said—with only a strand of leather about his waist and fringe about as wide as a man’s hand covering his private parts. He carried a bow and two arrows and the Pilgrims noticed that his hair was long in the back but shaved at the front of his head. They had seen nothing like this back in England.

  As startling as this Indian was to the Pilgrims, it was what happened next that shocked them most of all. The man neared, paused, and then shouted “Welcome!” in clear, perfect English. And then, more astonishing still, he asked—again, flawlessly in the Pilgrims’ own tongue—if they had some beer.

  Yes. Beer.

  This is the truth, and you likely didn’t know it because it is rarely mentioned in the textbooks or in the Thanksgiving specials on TV. It is right there, though, in Mourt’s Relation and Of Plymouth Plantation, the two primary sources we have for the Pilgrim story. You see, this native’s name was Samoset and as he told his story the Pilgrims learned that he had mastered their language while traveling with English ships up and down the coast of New England. He had grown fond of the Englishmen, had become accustomed to their ways, and had apparently developed a taste for English beer. Thus it was that Samoset and his quiet companion, Squanto, became part of the magnificent adventure these Pilgrims were destined to live.

  And beer continued to play a defining role in the Pilgrim story. Consider, for example, how the Pilgrims came to decide to finally put ashore and start building their historic settlement.

  When they first left the shores of England, the passengers of the Mayflower had plenty of beer for their voyage on board. This valuable supply was tended by the famous John Alden, hero of the Longfellow tale. But by the time they reached New England, their stores of beer were running desperately low. They saw this as threatening disaster. Beer for them was more than just an enjoyable drink. They not only believed that it had important medicinal qualities that they would need in the New World, but they, like most of the people of their time, drank beer for fear of drinking water. Since the
teeming cities of Europe often polluted the nearby rivers and streams, deaths from drinking of these waters were not unknown, and seventeenth-century Europeans came to believe that most all water was unsafe. Beer, though, was seen as healthy and pure. We now know what people of that time did not: the boiling, which is part of brewing beer, and the alcohol that results kills the germs that sometimes contaminate water.

  It was fear of running out of beer, then, that partially forced the Pilgrims to leave the Mayflower and get busy building their new lives on shore. They had reached the New World in late November but had spent nearly a month looking for a good site on which to build. As William Bradford later wrote of those nervous, searching days, “We had yet some beer, butter, flesh and other victuals left, which would quickly be all gone and then we should have nothing to comfort us.” Finally, just when their supplies had nearly run out, they thought they spied some good land for a settlement. Of this Bradford wrote, “So in the morning, after we had called on God for direction, we came to this resolution—to go presently ashore again and to take a better view of two places which we thought most fitting for us; for we could not now take much time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.” Thus was Plymouth, Massachusetts, founded.

  It is testimony to the importance of beer in their story that the brewery was the first permanent building the Pilgrims constructed. As Gregg Smith has written in his excellent history of beer, “Their critical shortage made a brewhouse a priority among the structures built that first winter in Plymouth. Even if the Pilgrims’ supply weren’t scarce, the need for a brewery was immediate. The population of the small colony expanded faster than ale could be shipped from Europe. And of all the hardships the settlers endured, the lack of beer caused them the most displeasure.”