The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

by Stephen Mansfield

“Well, then, let’s go,” she ordered. I chuckled a bit and, gently mocking her intensity, I asked, “So where are you going?” She half turned in my direction but spoke mainly to her friends as she said, “These people did something.” Then, jabbing her finger fiercely toward the floor, she finished, “And I want to learn all about it.”

It is evidence of Mark Twain’s insistence that a lie can run around the world before the truth can get its pants on, a maxim more true in an Internet age than at any time in history.

What Arthur Guinness founded was a venture propelled by faith, yes—but by a kind of faith that inspires men to make their work in this world an offering to God, to understand craft and discipline, love of labor and skills transferred from father to son as sacred things. It was a venture of faith that took the fruit of the earth and, through study and strain, made of it something of greater value. Indeed, much of the great 250-year history of Guinness beer is a story in which wealth is gained through faith-inspired excellence and then used to serve others for the glory of God.

“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”

“You cannot make money from people unless you are willing for people to make money from you.”

Concerts and lectures were provided for the wives of workers, in the belief that the moral and intellectual level of a home would rise only to that of the mother or wife who lived there.

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.

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.

Lector, si monumentum requiris circumspice. The words meant, “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”