Peter Egelston: Like most of us, I got started by drinking a whole lot of beer, back in the early seventies right through college. None of it was very good: it was a matter of quantity over quality. I was living in New York City with a friend of mine, and we stumbled across an ad in a magazine for a homebrew kit. Neither of us had ever heard of homebrewing before. We thought it was the silliest thing we could imagine.

Was it even legal?

At that point, it was just barely legal—it had been made legal during the Carter administration, and this was firmly in the Reagan years. We scraped together the 10 or 15 bucks and sent it in and got a plastic tub, some tubes, a can of malt syrup, a pathetic little baggie of grayish brown hops and a package of desiccated freeze-dried yeast and half a page of type-written instructions.

We followed the directions and made a batch of predictably lousy-tasting beer. My roommate lost interest immediately, but I was intrigued and started homebrewing occasionally.

The only place I could buy homebrewing supplies was in a winemaking shop down on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. They had one shelf in the very back of the shop that had more of the same: cans of malt, and more grey hops and desiccated yeast.

I was really intrigued with brewing, but certainly never dreamed it would be the way I would make a living. I was teaching high school English in the New York City public school system at the time. I was working on a master’s degree in education and had completed all the requirements for certification. It was funny: on one hand they were desperate for teachers, but on the other they were setting the bar very high. They were deluding themselves that they were only getting the best quality candidates, when, in fact, if they put a mirror under your nose and saw vapor, they’d hire you.

In 1986, my sister and her boyfriend came to town. They were working for a rock promotion company out of San Francisco, doing merchandising for tours, which is a fancy way of saying they were driving a Ryder truck around.

They were pretty weary of that life style. One night in Brooklyn, we were sitting around drinking my homebrewed beer. They were telling me about these great places on the West Coast that were little bars with their own in-house breweries. We thought, what a great idea, someone ought to do that here on the East Coast. We weren’t aware that there actually were a couple of places doing it already: it seemed like a wide-open market.

I have to give my sister Janet credit, she took the idea and wouldn’t let it drop. She got back to the Bay Area and talked to the handful of people—there was the Front Street Pub in Santa Cruz, there was Hopland, Mendocino Brewing, Portland, Bridgeport, and the Widmer Brothers were up and running. A very small number of places to talk to.

One thing led to another, and a year later we were opening the Northampton Brewery in western Mass. My sister still owns the place: she’s just celebrated her 19th anniversary down there. She’s doing terrific.

She and I were partners for fourteen years and then we split up our partnership about five years ago. We decided we preferred to be brother and sister to being partners—and we knew it had to be one or the other.

When you have a place that’s been round long enough, as the Northampton Brewery has, or my own Portsmouth Brewery, which just turned 15 this summer, people tend to regard these places as “institutions.” It reminds me of that quote from Mark Twain, that a classic is a book that everybody praises, and nobody reads. My fear is always that when you talk about a restaurant or brewpub as an “institution,” you mean a place that everybody has a fond memory of, but they haven’t been there in five years.

The challenge in the brewpub environment is that when we opened, the idea of hand-crafted beer was a fairly novel concept. If people wanted to try a bock beer or a weiss beer—anything that was a little bit out of the ordinary—they pretty much had to go to a brewpub. Now, any halfway decent restaurant or bar worth its salt has a nice beer selection.

The easy way of marketing brewpubs—that we were the only ones with hand-crafted beer—is more challenging now, because you’ve got wonderful beers that are widely available. It’s a challenge to stay constantly fresh and to find ways to surprise and delight our customers.

But Guinness, the man? Well, he is something of a mystery, even among those who walk in his shadows and perpetuate his legacy. I know. I’ve been looking for him.

The Empire

Dublin is the physical and spiritual home of Guinness, the empire. It was here that Arthur Guinness obtained a 9,000-year lease for a small plot of land in the St. James’s Gate neighborhood on December 31, 1759. Guinness’s purchase included a home for his family, a fish pond, gardens, a stable for horses, and a rundown old brewery that had not produced a beer in 10 years. The entire estate measured less than 40,000 square feet.

Today, the St. James’s Gate brewery sprawls across dozens of acres on the south bank of the River Liffey. It features a gym for employees, a theater, scores of buildings in various states of repair and use, and a state-of-the-art brewhouse with enough computers and wall-size control grids to run a nuclear power plant. It provides, among other things, all the Guinness Draught Stout for Ireland and the “diaspora” markets: Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States. It also makes Guinness “essence” – a viscous, black malt extract – and ships it in MG Mini-sized plastic containers to Guinness breweries around the globe which then turn it into Guinness Foreign Extra Stout. It’s not an unsubstantial market. Nigeria, for example, is poised to surpass Ireland as Guinness’s No. 2 market after Great Britain. The St. James’s Gate brewery is, in other words, an industrial behemoth that lords over the western edge of Dublin, the consciousness of a nation, and a global business empire.

St. James’s Gate is not without its more romantic recesses, though tourists never see them: In a vast kegging room, brewers do their final quality control check, pouring from a tap in perfect two-part form the freshest pint of draught Guinness one will ever taste. Hops are stored in a 19th century brick warehouse, kept naturally cool by a hollow floor built over water. Next to this warehouse are giant roasting drums that turn golden barley into the black, acrid grains that give Guinness its famous color and distinct, toasted flavor. (Before recently enacted industrial emissions standards, an east-moving wind would carry the dank, tactile aroma of toasting grains all across Dublin.) The cement floor beneath the kettles is speckled with blackened granules. If you’re lucky enough to happen upon this corner of St. James’s Gate – and chances are you will not be – you can pick up a couple of these tiny grains, crush them between your teeth, and get a bitter, budding taste of Guinness long before it’s turned to liquid.

St. James’s Gate also boasts, amid a frenetic visitors’ center that attracts 700,000 people a year, a solemn, well-kept archive that is a repository of all things Guinness: The only known painting of Arthur Guinness is kept here. So is his original 9,000-year lease; more than 200 years of brewers’ recipes and notes; Guinness family biographies; and employee records. The archive does a brisk business in Irish-Americans seeking information about family members who once worked here. Guinness’s past is an important part of the company’s identity. The company employs three fulltime archivists, one in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, where the archives of parent company Diageo are kept, and two here in Dublin – the only corporate archivists in the entire republic.

There is plenty about Arthur Guinness reposed within the archives. He was accepted into the Dublin Corporation of Brewers, a trade group, in July 1759; married Olivia Whitmore, a cousin of Irish parliamentarian and nationalist Henry Grattan, in 1761; became brewer to Dublin Castle, the local seat of British government, in 1784; brewed the last Guinness ale in 1799, so that he might focus on producing a popular porter that was the foundation of a growing reputation. Guinness, the name, is synonymous with stout. One learns at the Guinness archive that Guinness, the man, never brewed a beer called stout.

There is, however, a notable list of items the Guinness archive does not contain: namely, little to nothing in Arthur Guinness’s own words. No personal diary. No collection of correspondence. No words of business wisdom published for the masses. What, for example, inspired a rural businessman from the horse country of Kildare to try his fortune in Dublin? Did he fear failure? Expect success? What were his highs and lows; his thoughts and hopes and dreams? Did Guinness, the man, ever imagine that one day Guinness, the name, would be known on all corners of the planet? There are many questions about Arthur Guinness, the man. He left behind few answers.

Where, Guinness devotees might inquire, did Arthur Guinness learn to brew beer? The Guinness empire is built upon this knowledge. Surely, someone must know the answer. In 1928, family historian Henry Seymour Guinness compiled a lengthy set of notes for a guidebook to the Dublin brewery that’s kept in its archives. “No evidence is forthcoming,” he wrote, “to indicate how or where Arthur acquired a knowledge of brewing.”

Perhaps the key to unraveling the mysteries of Guinness, the man, lay elsewhere. With archivist Eibhlin Roche’s roadmap of Ireland in hand, I set out to see the world Arthur Guinness had known.

“It had a romantic feel,” he said. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve appreciated the Old World style, things that were European.”

He also liked beer. “Even when I was young, I liked the taste,” he said. “Coors or Lucky Lager, you couldn’t beat it.”

When others say they studied beer in college, they are usually talking about Friday nights in the bars or Saturday afternoons around a keg. When Carey studied beer at the University of California at Davis, he earned a degree in brewing science and served his first internship shoveling out the mash tun at River City Brewing in Sacramento.

By the time he and his wife, Deborah, founded the New Glarus Brewing Co. in 1993, he had worked for three years at a microbrewery in Montana; interned at Ayinger Brewery in Bavaria; been valedictorian of a 13-week Siebel Institute Course in Brewing Science and Technology; installed dozens of small breweries for equipment maker J. V. Northwest; and spent three years as brewing supervisor at Anheuser-Busch’s Fort Collins, CO, plant. He also took and passed the Diploma Master Brewer Examination at the Institute of Brewing in London, becoming the first American in 19 years to do so.

A little more than three years after New Glarus began selling beer, Carey went to Germany and bought a used but classic European brew house–complete with glistening copper kettles–that he uses today.

Few brewers in the United States are focused as early as Carey on their eventual careers. But some may have more in common with him than others. Take, for instance, the individuals who ask the question every professional brewer is destined to answer hundreds of times: “How do I become a brewer?”