Arthur Guinness leased a disused brewery for £45 a year; by 1880, St. James's Gate was already the largest brewery in the world
On December 31, 1759, a 34-year-old Irish brewer named Arthur Guinness signed the lease on a disused brewery at St. James's Gate, in Dublin. The site covered four acres, the rent was £45 a year and the term was 9,000 years, according to the Guinness Storehouse, the brand's official visitor center.
Arthur was born in 1725 near Celbridge, in County Kildare. His father, Richard Guinness, managed the lands of the Archbishop of Cashel, Arthur Price, and oversaw the beer brewed for the estate's workers, which probably introduced his son to the craft, the Storehouse says. With a £100 bequest left by the archbishop, Arthur set up a small brewery in Leixlip with his brother before taking over the one in Dublin.
The lease came with a limited water supply. When the Dublin authorities tried to cut off the supply for overuse, Arthur confronted the officials and would not let the cut go ahead, according to the official Guinness website. In 1763 he was elected warden of the city's brewers' guild and, in 1767, its master.
At first, the brewery made ale. In the 1770s, Arthur began brewing porter, a new style of beer from England, and in 1799 he dropped ale to focus on it alone. West India Porter appeared in 1801, with more hops and more alcohol to withstand long sea voyages; in 1849 it became Guinness Foreign Extra Stout, still the most popular version in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
The first known export left Dublin port for England in 1796, and the first international shipment reached Barbados, in the Caribbean, in 1822. By around 1880, St. James's Gate was already the largest brewery in the world. The first brewery outside Ireland and the UK would only come in 1962, in Ikeja, Nigeria.
The label appeared in 1862 and became a registered trademark in 1876, with Arthur's signature, the harp and the Guinness name. The harp is based on the Brian Boru harp, from the 14th century, kept at Trinity College in Dublin. When the Irish Free State adopted the harp as its symbol in 1922, it had to turn it the other way so as not to infringe the brewery's trademark.
Sources: Guinness Storehouse (official website, October 14, 2026), Guinness (official website, October 14, 2026).
