Editing Guinness (section)

==History==

Arthur Guinness started brewing ales from 1759 in Leixlip, then at the St. James's Gate Brewery, Dublin. On 31 December he signed a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery. Ten years later on 19 May 1769 Guinness exported his ale for the first time, when six and a half barrels were shipped to England.

Guinness is sometimes believed to have originated the stout style of beer. However the first use of the word stout in relation to beer was in a letter in the Egerton Manuscript dated 1677, almost 50 years before Arthur Guinness was born. Arthur Guinness started selling the dark beer porter in 1778. The first Guinness beers to use the term were Single Stout and Double Stout in the 1840s.

The breweries pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym "Student" for techniques developed for Guinness, particularly Student's t-distribution and the even more commonly known Student's t-test. Guinness brewed their last porter in 1974.

Guinness acquired the Distillers Company in 1986. The Company then merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo plc.

The Guinness brewery in Park Royal, London closed in 2005. The production of all Guinness was switched to St. James's Gate Brewery, Dublin.

Guinness has also been referred to as "Black Stuff" and as a "Pint of Plain" - referred to in the famous refrain of Flann O'Brien's poem "The Workman's Friend": "A pint of plain is your only man."