While I was in a pub in Dublin on a Saturday evening, I observed an additional flock of youthful travelers asking for a round of “Baby Guinnesses.” I found myself questioning how the influential beer company that the name suggests ever allowed this concept to gain popularity.
You may not know this, especially if you haven’t been to a bar recently, but a baby Guinness is a drink consisting of three parts coffee liqueur, commonly Kahlua or Tia Maria, with the remaining part being Bailey’s Irish Cream.
This drink aims to replicate the iconic pint of stout visually, but in a smaller quantity. Interestingly, its cost doesn’t depart much from that of a regular pint, equivalent to approximately €6.40. However, it is essential to note that it does not contain any Guinness.
While Baileys does have ties to Diageo, it is evident that the beer industry still benefits from this. Regardless, a considerable portion of the rising profits skirts the Guinness name.
The act of stealing the brand is more obvious when considering that the term “Baby Guinness” has neoteric origins and was at one point synonymous with some Guinness products.
The phrase has distinct connotations compared to “Baby Power,” a small whiskey bottle, and was primarily used to refer to a smaller pint bottle, or half-pint.
In 1907, this phrase was part of a headline for a Dublin court case where a pub on Francis Street was declared guilty of flouting the Sunday closing rule. Notably, there wasn’t a “baby” sized drink involved in this incident. Instead, a woman had been advised to conceal a jar of porter under her shawl and claim it was an infant if anyone happened to ask. Thus, making it a “baby Guinness,” a phrase that was jested by the prosecuting lawyer leading to courtroom laughter.
Ironically, this lawyer’s wit was fitting. The name “Baby Guinness” not only has ties to the St James’s Gate brewery, but the company has also had a somewhat infamous connection with motherhood in the past.
Recently, the London Times highlighted the enduring popularity of Guinness beer, a report which sparked some nostalgic responses. A letter from a retired doctor named Margaret James-Moore recounted memories of her younger years in Ireland. She recalled the practice of Guinness providing miniature bottles of their product to nursing mothers at a maternity hospital in Dublin in 1963, with the junior doctors savouring the unclaimed bottles each evening.
This anecdote brought to light an intriguing possibility about the origin of the non-alcoholic cocktail, known as “baby Guinness”. An unverified Wikipedia entry suggests this cocktail originated in the 80s or 90s at a now-shuttered Dublin pub, The Waxies’ Dargle. Located on Granby Row, close to the Rotunda Hospital, it was here that the pub’s own coffee and cream liqueur, named “baby Guinness”, was traditionally given to expectant or recent parents.
If this is accurate, it seems somewhat poetic that a cocktail borrowing the famous name without benefiting the brewery might be a hidden cost of the period when Guinness was advertised as healthful, even in maternity wards. It appears that certain actions may haunt Guinness, much like a child unexpected but not unloved perhaps.
Changing the subject, I recently discovered a curious nugget in a book called “A Writer’s City” by Chris Morash. The book delves into Dublin from a literary perspective, geographically charting significant sites. In one chapter, it details that JM Synge, born in 1871 in Rathfarnham, moved with his mother to Rathgar in 1882. The intriguing detail here is that their new house was approximately a leisurely ten minutes walk from where [James] Joyce was born the same year in Brighton Square, as per the text. The author ventures with a bold claim that as infants, they might have crossed paths in their prams. However, my calculations seem to dispel this possibility as Synge would have been close to 11 by the time Joyce was born. If he was indeed still in a pram at this age, literary critics would likely not have let such an oddity go unnoticed.
Perhaps even the unusually mature Joyce may have remembered their tendency to cross paths on the walkway, tossing pacifiers at each other. The bizarre scene posed by a young Synge in a pushchair could have added a fresh interpretation to the phrase ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.
If true, the celebrated author of Playboy’s post-toddler strolls would have likely earned a commemorative beverage in Dublin.
At some point, an individual may have confidently walked into a liquor store and requested a “J.M. Synge”. To which the bewildered shop assistant may have responded, “A what?” Then the all-knowing customer would indicate the small bottles of Midleton Redbreast, or similar, and specify: “A whiskey of 12 years old, but in small size, please.”