Guinness is on a huge run. Here's what's going on—and what it means for breweries thinking long-term.
The Turnaround
Guinness is on a winning streak. Sales are up 14%. At one point demand was so strong the brand couldn't make enough beer and had to ration. That growth has been driven by young drinkers—who invented and spread the worldwide G-splitting phenomenon on social media. A new Open Gate brewery just opened in London. The momentum is real.
The contrast to nine years ago is stark. When Guinness first came on as a sponsor, spirits and craft beer were soaring. I kept hearing rumors that parent company Diageo might spin off its Guinness division to focus on spirits. Selling breweries was in vogue. American-style craft was the story. A 257-year-old stout brand felt dowdy. Now Guinness is the crown jewel. That's the value of a diversified portfolio: trends shift, and some products cool off while others heat up.
At the time, those rumors surprised me. Guinness was one of the strongest brands in the world—a blip in sales didn't change that. Give a brand centuries and it will have fallow periods. I didn't write a post about it then, which is a shame, because I was right. I did tell folks at Guinness to keep the faith. All it took was a war in Europe, a pandemic, and the tarnished luster of craft beer.
The Value of Age
Guinness achieved something rare: a brand that transcends its category and carries real cultural weight. It's so strong it's synonymous with a country—Ireland—and St. James's Gate is that country's single most popular tourist destination. Every other best-selling beer in the world is a pale lager. Guinness is the exception. You see the harp in Irish pubs everywhere.
That kind of brand can't be built in years, or even a few decades. It's the result of accretion over time—rumor, romantic fact, old ads and slogans that have become part of collective culture. The ritual of the pour is something close to sacred. It isn't just a drink; it's a collection of physical and intangible things that have touched beer drinkers on every continent. Most of those assets can't be conjured. They require time, sustained work, and a population slowly accepting the brand as something more than a product.
What people know about Guinness already makes it one of the most understood brands in the world. What they don't know dwarfs that—and it's a rich vein the company can mine anytime. The flagship has been stable for over sixty years but has been evolving for two hundred. The brewery tour takes visitors through alleyways bounded by vast gabled warehouses housing the industrial oaken vats where stout once aged. The roastery is there too, churning out the black unmalted barley that defines the flavor. Even the nitro surge and the pour have their own backstory. All of that history, seen and unseen, permeates a brand that has been a constant for generations.
People Return to Great Brands
No company stays on the leading edge forever. The beer industry has alternated between growth and innovation and stasis and decline for centuries. Sometime around the late aughts, beer entered a period of change and innovation—peaking right when Guinness agreed to sponsor this site.
In the 2010s, "craft" drove the industry. It was a model built in the U.S. and exported globally, with features designed to undermine legacy brands: novelty, experimentation, taprooms, local and "hand-crafted," and hops, hops, hops. It was a hard time to be an old brewery. I may have written a death-of-flagship post or two myself.
Things always change. Even without Covid scrambling the landscape, we weren't going to stay in that phase of constant novelty. People get exhausted. Add a pandemic and political instability, and they really return to old, comforting ways. When they did, Guinness was there. The best breweries—Sierra Nevada, Allagash, New Glarus—survived the craft boom by retaining a positive impression even when they weren't driving the zeitgeist. Add Guinness to that list.
Periods of explosive innovation are necessarily short. For older breweries, the trick is sticking to your guns and expanding in ways that support rather than undermine your core legacy while you wait out the boom. Those who do that can survive. When the book closes on a trend, they're in a strong position to make their rediscovery feel fresh again.
No one at Guinness predicted that young drinkers with TikTok would spark a sensation around their beer. But if you'd asked which kind of brewery would benefit from that phenomenon, it would have been one like Guinness. Few breweries focus so heavily on draft, placing themselves at the center of social life. It's popular enough that people worldwide can join the game. And it already has a dense culture around drinking—splitting the G is a way of gamifying a much older habit.
It was lucky that Guinness was the beneficiary. It was also more than luck. Guinness has been a well-tended brand that tells its own story through good times and bad. They couldn't control the industry or how well they fit in at any given moment. But they could keep telling their story, encourage people to develop a relationship with the brand, and make sure it remained a comforting place to return to.
Why Now
Today, that's where people want to be. The world is unstable, especially for young drinkers spending half their paychecks on small apartments. They face more threats than any generation in decades: college debt, an AI era that may eliminate whole sectors of jobs, climate change, political instability, media corruption, and social vitriol. This isn't a time for risk-taking. It's a moment when people are taking refuge in safe ports and reliable brands.
Guinness isn't alone—the popularity of old Mexican brands follows the same script. But it has the advantage of being a 4.2% black ale with theatricality and a creamy head. It's both safe and different from other global brands.
Ten years ago, Diageo nearly lost its nerve and forgot the lessons of Guinness's long history. Fortunately, they went the other way—building new breweries and investing in telling the story of their heritage. Today it's paying off. Guinness won't grow forever. It never has. But with care and tending, it should remain healthy for decades. For American breweries now entering their third, fourth, or fifth decade, it stands as a case study for long-term survival.
Operational discipline and brand stewardship both matter. BrewLedger is built to support the former—see how it works when you're ready.