Bar draws ire of the Irish over Guinness pour faux pas
Beer’s connoisseurs outraged over improperly poured stout in St. Patrick’s Day promo
A Vancouver restaurant provoked the ire of the Irish after sharing a photo of a poorly poured pint of Guinness to promote its St. Patrick’s Day party.
Railtown Café’s photo of an overflowing drink with foam oozing down the glass was meant to be artsy, owner Dan Olson said.
But it “was a little too artsy and it really struck a chord with some of our Irish clientele out there,” admitted Olson, who woke up Tuesday morning to a barrage of emails and comments on the restaurant’s socialmedia profiles.
What he thought was an inoffensive photo had quickly caught the atten- tion of Guinness connoisseurs from as far away as Ireland, the home of the beloved brew.
The faux pas was picked up by Irish news outlets like the Irish Independent, Joe and the Daily Edge, which expressed bitter disappointment over the pour.
One story called it “sacrilegious” while another said, “No, just no . . . ”
Online commenters were also perturbed, with one Twitter user calling it “an abomination.”
The backlash was “pretty negative,” Olson said. “People took it quite serious. They felt like we were digging at their heritage basically. So anyway, that’s one thing we’ve learned so far: don’t mess with a person and their Guinness.”
For the uninitiated, there’s an art to pouring a Guinness.
“It takes 119.5 seconds, just about two minutes and it’s a double pour cascade,” said Patrick McMurray, owner of Ceili Cottage, an east-end Toronto Irish pub.
McMurray called Railtown’s pour “the worst thing ever” and said it had been poured once, likely to the top, rather than in two parts as it should have been.
Though the flavour wouldn’t have been too compromised by the pour, said McMurray, a Guinness in that state is unacceptable.
“It’s really the art and the experience of the whole thing. If it’s not properly poured, it’s not presented to you properly. Eyes eat first, so your eyes are going to be jealous of what your tongue is tasting.”
Olson says he’s learned his lesson. The incriminating photo was removed from the restaurant’s socialmedia accounts and has been replaced with a new, improved one and an apology for the earlier flub.
“Thanks for the friendly comments, everyone!” it read. “We’re not all a bunch of maple-syrup drinking snow farmers and to make up for the blasphemous pour depicted in the previous photo, we’ve poured another pint that we hope is worthy of Ireland.”
To bury the hatchet, Olson said he’s offering to buy anyone who comes in on St. Patrick’s Day with their Irish passport a properly poured pint of Guinness and a shot of Jameson.