"I think forty-one Guinness is piggish."
--Dylan Thomas

"To which particular boosing shed?"
--James Joyce, Ulysses

The best pint in town is poured at Biddy McGraw's, 6000 NE Glisan St., 233-1178.

The cheapest pint of Guinness ($2.50) can be found at the Hollywood Inn, 3634 NE Sandy Blvd., 236-2909, from 9 pm-midnight Tuesdays, and Angelo's, 4620 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 231-0337, all day Wednesdays.

Guinness tasting: 5-7 pm Friday, March 16, at Belmont Station, 4520 SE Belmont St., 232-8538.

Arthur Guinness and his wife, Elizabeth Whitmore Guinness, had 21 children, only 10 of whom lived to adulthood.

A pint of Guinness contains 200 calories.

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White Lightening

MEN IN BLACK
by ABRAM GOLDMAN-ARMSTRONG
243-2122

DATELINE: Dublin, Ireland. In most of the world, Guinness is recognized as one of Ireland's major contributions to the planet (Bono probably wouldn't even try to compete). The brew is lauded in poems and
stories, and 10 million glasses of the black stuff are consumed every day.

A certain mystique surrounds Guinness, as well as more than a few rumors. (Some I've heard are "It's made with River Liffey water" and "There's meat added, that's why it's so rich." Neither is true.)

After 242 years, Guinness is still the drink of choice in Ireland (84 percent of the beer market) and among many would-be-Irish on St. Patrick's Day.

Ever on the quest for an interesting beer story, I began wrangling with the Guinness administration to set up a tour of the production facility long before I flew to Ireland in January. Thankfully, they eventually succumbed to my pestering.

On Jan. 17 I arrived at the brewery entrance, the famous St. James's Gate. The oldest building on the site now houses offices and dates from 1810, a decade after Guinness stopped brewing ale and became a porter brewery exclusively. Tracks from the small railway that once shunted ingredients around the site still run from building to building; now a subwaylike tunnel connects the brewhouse and fermentation cellars.

This is a business that has grown at a spectacular rate. It began as a dilapidated four-acre brewery that was leased by Arthur Guinness for £45 a year for 9,000 years in 1759. In the 1820s the company brewed "Extra Stout Porter" for export to the West Indies (the term "porter" was eventually dropped). By 1833 it was the largest brewery in Ireland, by 1914 the largest in the world. Guinness is now brewed in 51 countries and available in more than 150.

Modern visitors to Guinness are shown into a massive museum called the Storehouse--it reminded me of Seattle's Experience Music Project without the post-modern architecture. The highlights of the museum include an advertising exhibit featuring personal TV screens showing ads from the 1950s to the present, and the rooftop Gravity Bar, with its superb view of Dublin.

The modern Guinness brewhouse opened in 1994, with six 840-barrel brewkettles. The massive control room calls to mind NASA's ground control: Men in suits sit at rows of computers facing a huge readout spilling forth information on every brewing and fermentation vessel on the site. The brewery is now almost entirely automated, from the brewhouse through to the kegging line, where I had the opportunity to sample a pint.

They say Guinness is better the closer you get to the brewery. Well, I couldn't get much closer than that. My pint was creamy and fresh with a hint of roastiness and a good, pale, malt flavor at the back. It wasn't the best I've had in my life: That honor would go to my very first Guinness, way back when, right here in Portland.

Sláinte.