Most people hear the word Dublin and, almost immediately, the city’s rich literary tradition, beautiful urban parks and diverse musical culture springs to mind.
Just kidding.
Most people hear Dublin and think “Guinness!” And if Guinness isn’t what springs to mind, Jameson is.
For good reason. Without question, the pub culture in Dublin lives up to its famous reputation. There’s places to go if you want to sit and have a pint and talk with friends, and there’s pubs good for starting off a wild night. For a quiet pint, my friends and I love what we call “old-man” pubs, where musicians who have never met before group haphazardly in a corner of the place and strike up trad songs that set empty glasses rattling. Those are the best places, where Dubliners talk to anyone within earshot (and farther away, once they’ve had a few).
Most of the pubs here have history behind them — they might have been through a handful of owners, but out of five pubs, it’s almost guaranteed James Joyce or Oscar Wilde or Bono will have had a drink at one of them. One of my favorite pubs, the Brazen Head, was built in 1198, making it the oldest pub in Ireland. And pubs aren’t just a weekend thing. American students might go for a coffee after class; the Irish head over to the Stag’s Head for a pint.
Before I write any further, I have to make a disclaimer: I live in one of the greatest European capitals of good beer and whiskey, and I don’t care for either. I find beer too bitter to be worth the calories. It also makes me feel like a man when I drink it. My dislike for whiskey, on the other hand, is quite unfounded — it makes me think of lumberjacks via a bizarre chain of Krystin-logic.
But no matter my personal preferences, Guinness is an institution here — so much so that one of the bridges spanning the river Liffey is a monument to the brand, with the name proudly emblazoned in gold on the black of the bridge. It’s essential a review of a good pub includes the phrase “perfectly-poured pint of Guinness” somewhere in its 400 words.
In fact, I’m quite sure the stout is the only reason Dublin’s still functioning as the city crawls from its economic train wreck — it’s just as filling as a meal, but half the price (and you don’t have to order a beer to go with the food).
But God forbid you mess with the stuff — it’s the Irish equivalent of holy water.
A Dublin woman I met in a pub one night told me her standard pub order: a Bulmer’s cider with a Guinness head. She said topping the pint with a bit of the Guinness cut the sharpness of the cider and made it go down a bit easier. So I handed over far too many euros and ordered her fermented concoction.
The looks I got from bartenders during the course of the evening ranged from shocked to downright murderous. It reminded me of when I told my French friends how to make mulled wine. “But why would you ruin perfectly good red wine?!” they asked, their sense of decency outraged.
Jameson is no less a source of pride for the Irish. They hold their whiskey to a celestial standard — one no other country’s whiskey dare aspire to. As my Irish Cultures professor explained to me before I went to visit the Jameson distillery, “At the end of the tour, you get three [tasting] glasses of whiskey. Take the American one and throw it on the ground. If you have a cut, use the Scotch whisky to treat it. Only the Irish whiskey is fit for drinking.”
Whiskey drinker, beer drinker, or none of the above, the pubs of Dublin really are one of the highlights of the city. They’ve also become a point of pride for Dubliners. With the fall of the Irish economy from boom to bust in only a few short years, pubs are some of the few thriving establishments in neighborhoods lined with empty windows and consignment shops.
But it’s easy to forget this in one of the city’s hundreds of pubs, where music reverberates off wooden ceilings
and people who were strangers swap stories.
The Guinness and Jameson institutions are as strong as ever despite the economy. Foam drips down pint glasses set hurriedly on coasters at the bar, and whiskey and cokes are in the hands of those not holding pints. Despite everything else, €4.50 for a pint of Guinness isn’t an extravagance, but a proud souvenir from better times.
