Visitors to Dublin have to visit the Guinness Storehouse, the magnificent brewery where what the Irish simply call the “black stuff” comes from. Famous for its creamy and velvety head and amber colour, Guinness has been acclaimed as the world’s best beer by its greatest fans.

The brewery goes all the way back to 1759, when Arthur Guinness signed a nine-thousand year lease with a ground rent of 45 pounds a year. The site extends over 26 hectares, which was such a large area that at one time a small private railway was needed to move around the site rapidly. A factory-town in the golden age when thousands and thousands of people worked there. Guiness sales were driven by advertising campaigns that made history and grew sales to record levels, winning  markets throughout the world. That’s why, a little like Fiat in Italy, its story is inextricably linked with that of Dublin in particular and of Ireland in general.

The visit consists of a self-guided tour of the museum, which is in the oldest parts of the complex, which have been converted into a hi-tech space, owing to a futuristic project that has transformed the original structure into a building that is 7 floors high and has the shape of a pint of Guinness. On the ground floor, in addition to the ticket office, there is a large store on two levels. Then, going up from floor to floor, there’s the museum, which has a lot of interactive sections and films tracing the phases of beer-brewing: from the barley to the water and the yeast, to bottling, with various tastings for the public. The fifth floor of the Guinness Storehouse houses a permanent exhibition of advertisements and sketches for Guinness that John Gilroy created from the 1930s onwards. It’s worth stopping off at the all-glass panoramic bar on the seventh floor. If you have more time, we recommend the elegant Brewery Bar on the fifth floor. This is a restaurant that serves creative and traditional Irish dishes that use Guinness in their recipes.

Address:  St.James Gate, Dublino

Stilleben travel is a photographic collection of places we saw and we liked, in which we found ourselves or which inspired us.