While Guinness’s St James’s Gate Brewery will forever be associated with the beloved “black stuff” it is also a fountainhead of innovation for a vast range of beers enjoyed by consumers around the world. In fact, every new beer launched by Diageo anywhere in the world starts out life in the microbrewery in St James’s Gate, where the highly skilled and imaginative team of brewers bring new concepts to life as part of their everyday work.
“Every new Diageo beer is developed here in St James’s Gate,” explains brewer Luis Ortega. “We have the only microbrewery in Diageo here. All African beers, Asian beers, American beers, any new beer launched anywhere in the world starts here. Guinness American Blonde is a recent example.”
Ortega and his colleague Peter Simpson are part of the Guinness “Brewers Project”, an initiative that encourages innovation by its talented team of expert brewers by giving them licence to work together exploring new recipes while drawing inspiration from the two and a half centuries of expertise contained in the Guinness archives.
Both are chemical engineers and have worked in Guinness for seven years. Simpson’s brewing experience started long before that, however. “My father brewed his own beer, and I was his helper,” he recalls. “Brewing at home is all about seeing what works and what doesn’t. You can try anything, so it’s excellent training for being part of the Brewers Project. We try anything. We’re about seeing what’s possible. Anything we can dream up we get to brew up. It’s great.”
But it’s very much brewing with a purpose. “There are two different ways we approach innovation,” Simpson adds. “The first is where we go off ourselves and experiment with recipes and look back through the archives and come up with a recipe from scratch. This is partly what happened with West Indies Porter and Dublin Porter. On other occasions the marketing team will come to us with some pointers as to what they want in a new product.”
“We might be provided with some direction on what the product should be,” Ortega adds. “ but then we are free to come up with our own proposal for everything else.”
And in other cases the brief can be more detailed. “We might be told to develop a pale ale with 4.5 per cent ABV,” Simpson continues. The first stage in the process of creating a new beer usually starts with assessing what’s already out there in the market, what the ABV range is, the flavours, and so on. There is little point in bringing out a new product that would simply be seen as a copy of something already out there. What the team is searching for is the elusive “white space” between the existing products.
Once they have defined what they are looking to create the process begins in earnest.
“We know where the flavour comes from,” says Ortega. “If it’s caramel or fruity we know where that comes from. We can bring out different flavours. They all come from the same four ingredients: the hops, barley, yeast and water. We use hops for flavour and aroma, and there are countless varieties of hops out there to choose from. Grains make big a difference, and crops vary from year to year. Yeast makes a very big difference; some people say 70 to 80 per cent of the taste comes from the yeast.”
And then it comes back to the old-fashioned trial-and-error process. “It might take a number of brews to get there in the microbrewery. We might try three or four different brews over consecutive days, changing different things to see what the differences are and to try to get it right.”
The team also gets opportunities to create products from scratch. “We get opportunities during the year: Christmas brews, wedding brews, birthday brews. Teams from across the business get the chance to come up with their own ideas for recipes, and we guide them through the process,” Simpson says.
“People are usually fascinated by what I do for a living, and you never forgot how lucky you are. The minute you enter the gates you can feel the energy and passion that all the brewers share for brewing. One of the most exciting parts of the job for me is when I am sitting in my local pub with my friends and I see people enjoying a beer I have created. It’s a super feeling!”
But the past is hugely important to the present. “Ideas do tend to come around again. Tastes change and the ways of doing things change. We’ve been here seven years and have seen so many new products in that time. The best part of the job is exploring new recipes and new flavours and seeing it through to production. No other job can give you that level of satisfaction. To see the product on the shelf and to see people enjoying it. You can’t beat it.”
Pair of porters: New products from old recipes
Two new porters have just been launched in Ireland: Dublin Porter and West Indies Porter. Although these may be brand new to the market, they actually have their roots in recipe books going back more than two centuries.
Ortega, Simpson and the rest of the Brewers Project team got the brief for the two new porters last December. "We had a relatively free rein," recalls Simpson. "The brief was to develop products that reflected the 250-plus years of heritage and tradition we have here. We did a lot of research in the archives, looking at recipes that we found appealing. It's good to make things you like yourself."
"They didn't record the measurements of things very precisely back then - but we still get the inspiration," adds Ortega.
Having got an idea of what they were looking to do, they set up a background team to help. "We set up the Porter Panel - a team of people in the brewery who judge and taste what we come up with. It took five or six brews to get it right: the flavour, the colour, the aroma," Ortega continues.
The results were the two porters. "We wanted to make Dublin Porter easy to drink, accessible and not too bitter", says Simpson. "West Indies is more complex and big-boned."
The two porters took six months to develop and then to upscale into the new Brewhouse No 4. "It's one thing to do it in the microbrewery; the next thing is to scale it up. We see the product through from its creation to full-scale brewing. And then we see it through to bottling and packaging for the market. It typically takes between nine and 12 months from brief to market. Sometimes can get it done in 16 weeks and sometimes it can take three years."
Join the Guinness brewers for a live Q&A at 12pm on Twitter this Thursday, October 30th – tweet in your questions to @GuinnessIreland and tag #AskBrewers