Regardless of how people express their love for this beer, Guinness has become one of the most iconic beer brands on Earth. The boil can be anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes. The 90 minute boil may be necessary to both reduce the volume collected from the sparge and concentrate the wort to your desired starting gravity. A longer boil can also contribute flavor complexity. Be sure to only start timing when you have that nice rolling boil going and don’t lid your brew pot. Add the hop addition at the 60 minute mark. Here, we find one of the main differences between Tropical Stout and Foreign Extra Stout; lager yeast. Nigeria is the brewery’s second largest sales market in the entire world, and Guinness has fourteen breweries on the continent of Africa alone.

Also, hop usage dropped slightly from the imported counterpart because they no longer had to make the long ocean journey. These changes were the first musings that would ultimately bring about the Tropical stout style. What Makes A Tropical Stout Different From A Foreign Extra Stout? We wrote that already, but it bears repeating. Why? Because as Wagner mentioned, Guinness is a global brand.

For best presentation and greatest appreciation a Tropical Stout should be served at 50-55°F in a tulip, mug, or pint glass. They are best stored at cellar temperatures away from light and can age for 9 months or more. There are lots of people out there that have made pale ales similar to Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and goodness knows a lot of hazy IPAs,” says Wagner. “Nitrogenated dry stout…there is really just Guinness. Even now seventy years later, Guinness Draught Stout in many ways stands alone.” World history…and Irish history, of course. Pull on Our ‘Harp’ Strings: How Guinness Trademarked the Harp Photography courtesy of Guinness

According to Hayden, those bottles are still turning up on beaches to this day. “It’s like the longest advertising campaign,” says Hayden. “I always wanted a complete one that wasn’t opened.” He finally got one. “It’s something I cherish,” says Hayden, who has yet to open the bottle and says he never will. Even for traditional Guinness drinkers in their strongest markets, the company offers new experiences. In London, a city that represents one of the most important markets for Guinness Draught, drinkers have the option of asking for Guinness Extra Cold. When they do, their pint is passed through a supercooler bringing it briefly to a subzero temperature before it is dispensed in the glass. In Lagos, the capital of the country that consumes the most Foreign Extra Stout, drinkers can ask for a Guinness Extra Smooth and be served a stout with similar fruity notes but with some creaminess that comes from added nitrogen. Both these stouts offer something extra while still remaining familiar to drinkers. They demonstrate that the growth of Guinness is built on paying attention to local drinkers and designing unique products for every region. Right now, the Caribbean remains outside of this innovation, since unlike other major markets there has never been a regionally exclusive Guinness for the West Indies. The Tropical stout style is still part of the Export Category in most competitions, so without actually trying the beer it is hard to say which are examples of the Tropical style and which are FES examples. For this reason I am not including any recent award winners. Though I would encourage you to seek out the winners in this category and see if you can figure out which may fall into the Tropical style. The West Indies Porter was the forerunner of the Foreign Export Stout. The slowly evolving style would reach West Africa by 1827 and South Africa by the 1860s. Though it may seem counter-intuitive to many a beer drinker, porters and stouts can be very refreshing in hot climates. The porter style and its offspring stout found fertile ground, and local brewers, first in the Caribbean and later in Africa, started to make their own versions of the styles. So in 1951 they hired Michael Ash, a scientist and mathematician. “Everyone is pouring out of one steel keg now, we know this is where the industry is going, so we need to figure out how to recreate what we’ve already been doing, but out of one keg,” says Wagner.As the tale goes, Sir Hugh Beaver, Managing Director of the Guinness brewery at the time, went out on a hunting trip with his buddies. While out shooting animals, he got into an argument with his friends about the fastest game bird. Without reaching a conclusion, Sir Beaver returned to the brewery, grabbed a few interns, and told them to figure it out along with a bunch of other facts and figures. It’s just little tidbits like this that make the mystique of Guinness that much more alluring. Let’s Set the Record Straight on The Guinness Book of Records Photography courtesy of Guinness