You won't exactly struggle to find a pint of Guinness in London, but next year, the Irish stout brand is opening an entire brewery in Covent Garden.
Guinness at Old Brewer's Yard will be a £73 million, 50,000 sq ft venue microbrewery/restaurant/marketing ploy producing limited edition beers, and generally waxing lyrically about what is already the most-quaffed dark beer in the world.
The thing that always got us about the Guinness Storehouse tour in Dublin is that you don't really get to experience the actual brewery, but the same mistake isn't being made here. Perhaps piggy-backing on the thirst for the brewery tours in London and elsewhere, Guinness' Covent Garden microbrewery will open up to the public, showing the limited edition and exclusive Old Brewer's Yard beers being made. (No word on if any basic pints of the black stuff will be brewed here.)
Crowning the development — which will take over multiple sites across Mercer Walk, Langley Street, Neal Street and Shelton Street — will be a restaurant and 360-degree glass rooftop space. (Their Dublin location has a rooftop bar, and it's rather spectacular, so here's hoping for something similar.)
The microbrewery will join London's 135-odd existing breweries, and no doubt be a wonderful bricks-and-mortar plug for the brand and its famous golden harp logo. For us though, Guinness will always be the fail-safe we order in pubs where there's nothing else decent to drink.
