Day 41 Friday 1 July 2016

Departure at 8.30am for the Guinness factory so that we are the first group in & before the factory opens to the general public. The queuing lines set up at the entrance must mean that there are big crowds in there at times, we are met by our guide & walk straight in. We are shown the full brewing process from the drying barley & roasting process to the hops, some sourced from Australia, to the water sourced from a spring in the mountains (pure with very little minerals) near Dublin. (not the River Liffey as most people think) The yeast is a constant as some yeast from each brew is kept for the next, since at least the early 19^th Century, with a supply of the strain of yeast kept in the Guinness Director’s safe. The display is very well set up with us moving up a floor at a time as we move through the different stages of the brewing process. There is various pieces of old machinery on display with simple explanations of each & where it fitted into the process. Guinness even made their own oak barrels for storage & transport plus owned a varied transport fleet for delivering the beer, from trucks & trains to ships.

Next it was the tasting room where there are four containers that waft out the aromas of the different stages of the brewing process, we move from smell to smell trying to pick the smell they are describing. It needs a better nose than mine. Taste test is next & our guide explains the tasting process, the breathing in & holding the breath then taking a mouthful & swirling the beer around the mouth, then breathing out. I can’t taste the distinguishing features either. It does taste good though. We have a good look at a display of the advertising that Guinness has used over the years, some of it is very innovative, the more recent ones using animal caricatures. One ad is a fish riding a bike with a strange slogan………….an Australian woman thought it up. Also on display was an ancient harp, made in 1702 & once owned & played by a great Irish Musician. The Irish harp is the official trademark of Guinness.

Tour over we then head up to the Gravity Bar, a glass circular room on top of the building for a pint of Guinness to round the tour off. The view from here over the city of Dublin is spectacular through the full 360 degrees. Apparently this was the first sky scraper built. Had to hurry up with the photographing because a heavy black cloud was rolling in. We had to make a dash for the coach because that “Irish mist” was really coming down.

Our next adventure was a bus tour around Dublin city for 1 ½ hours with a local guide. She was very knowledgeable & interesting, though a lot harder to appreciate all of the sights because we are on a bus & have to keep on moving so no hands on when we wanted to see more. We got dropped off in the city outside the National Library, then walked across to the Grafton Street pedestrian mall for a slow stroll along window shopping & enjoying the streetscape. At the end of Grafton Street we found St Stephens Green, a large park with lots of trees, garden beds, park benches & ponds. We find a spare bench in the sunshine & have our lunch, then just as we finish, rain & a cold wind rolled in so we rug up & shelter under some large trees for a while until it settles down enough for us to walk again.

We walk out of the park down Kildare Street to the Irish National Museum. The building the Museum is housed in is beautiful itself, with ornate carved stonework & colourful ceramic tiling around the doors, plus magnificent exposed ornate roof trusses. The primary display is around Celtic gold discovered in various hoards around Ireland in bogs when being dug for peat. The detail & craftsmanship is extraordinary & revealed a very sophisticated society before the Viking invasions. There is also a display on the Vikings, with a focus on the various weapons & tools that have been recovered. There is also displayed some moulds cut from stone that were used for the casting of bronze tools & also a bronze short sword. On display were some unbelievably well preserved human remains that were found in bogs & the oldest of these is around 2,400 years old. The information they have on these people is amazing, the research has been very extensive. They even know what they had been eating, wearing & how they died.

Some of the religious artefacts in the museum were very significant, I though the most interesting & historically significant was the Cross of Cong, it was made to enshrine a small portion of the True Cross. There were other reliquaries used to store & preserve other treasures, such as small body parts of various saints, or holy books. A bell said to belong to St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland is also on display alongside its reliquary. A great museum & good displays.

On the way to our coach pick-up point a building we passed had some very interesting stone carvings on the base of some pillars, one was of 3 monkeys playing billiards, another of a dog chasing a rabbit.

A bit over an hour later we were bused to our dinner venue, a traditional old Irish pub called “The Old Punch Bowl”, established in 1719. We had traditional Irish food, vegetable soup, bacon, cabbage & mashed potatoes, & apple pie, washed down again by a pint of Guinness. There was an interesting display of old artefacts around the walls. Just on time, just as we were to walk out the door to catch our coach, that Irish mist bucketed down again. Thankfully our coach driver ran up to us with an armful of umbrellas, we were very thankful. On the way back the rainbow was very colourful as the sun shone through. We were looking out towards the ends of the rainbow but we couldn’t spot the elusive little leprechauns with their pot of gold. The temperature was 11C. We give thanks every day that we came in summer.

Another great day.