If there are two trends that encapsulate our strange late-capitalist moment, it is surely these: the terrifying-but-also-oddly-underwhelming rise of AI; and the elevation of Guinness from a 7-out-of-10 stout to the apex status drink. One is a dark, shape-shifting technology surrounded by misinformation and bandwagon hype — and the other is AI. Good stuff.
It is pleasing, then, to see these two forces collide in an admittedly excellent new project, the ‘Guinndex’. This is a searchable platform launched this week by two engineers, Matt Cortland and John Fleming, which has pieced together a comprehensive index of Guinness pint prices throughout the UK. (Somewhere in Camberwell a man in a Percival overshirt just fainted). The founders built a “conversational AI voice agent” named Rachel (they based her accent, funnily enough, on that of the Northern Irish winner of the most recent series of The Traitors) and got it to call every pub in the country and ask how much a pint of Guinness cost — before transcribing the conversations and pooling the data, and presumably editing out all the bits where people said: “wait, why is Rachel from the most recent series of The Traitors calling the pub?”
Along the way, the survey has also captured an interesting snapshot of the state of pubs in this country today — from naming conventions to architectural history (did you know that 392 pubs in the UK used to be railway offices?) I have now parsed this extensive data with my own AI system (and I can thoroughly recommend young Alistair Ingleby to anyone looking for an unpaid intern) — and present some of the more notable findings below.
This is true of 32 pubs across the country, 29 of which are Wetherspoons. The cheapest pint of Guinness in the land costs £2.94 at The Wallaw, in Northumberland. The cheapest area for a Guinness in England is The Wirral, with an average price of £4.23, while the cheapest area in the wider UK is Clackmannanshire in Scotland, which averages £4.12 a pint.
The two most expensive pints in the country sit at £9.50 a pop, at both The Grapes Inn in North Yorkshire and The Nags Head in Essex. The most expensive place to get a pint in the country on average, however, is Kensington and Chelsea, where it’ll likely cost you £7.61. Perhaps unsurprisingly there is a stark north-south divide when it comes to pricing — a ‘Guinness Equator’, as the researchers deem it. “There is a line running roughly through Oxford, Cambridge and Norwich,” Cortland has said. “North of it, a pint of Guinness averages £5.70. Below it, it jumps to £6.”
…but a strange sort of pub-adjacent liminal warehouse space at Stansted Airport. As its completely un-geographical name suggests, The Camden Bar & Kitchen hopes to bring “the vibrant spirit of Camden” to the terminal, which is a bit like promising to conjure the “tranquil mood of Kinshasa” at your spa. The ‘pub’ has been reviewed over 19,000 times on Google, with an impressive average rating of 4.4 out of 5. In second place for number of reviews is the Farmer’s Dog in Oxfordshire — Jeremy Clarkson’s pub/ plot device in Oxfordshire.
There are 527 pubs called The Red Lion in this country; 381 called The Royal Oak; and 329 called the Plough. In England, 7.2% of all pubs are named after royalty, while in Scotland, a large proportion of establishments are named after geographical features: Loch, Ben, Glen, and Brae all appear pretty frequently.
The Duke of Wellington is the most commonly name-checked real person in pub titles (126 times), followed by Admiral Nelson (100), Shakespeare (37) and Churchill (16). The most popular animals in pub names, meanwhile, are Lion (921 examples), Horse (762) and Swan (471.) But some names of notable pubs defiantly upend convention: like The Hung, Drawn & Quartered in Tower Bridge, Ye Olde Smack in Essex, and the slightly concerning Hole In The Wall in Waterloo.
This survey could only have worked with Guinness — that universal pub constant which has no equivalent in the highly fractured lager market, say. The drink’s universality is a remarkable chameleonic trick, when you think of it. We see in it what we want. Is Guinness a good, humble, nostalgic stout from everyone’s favourite oppressed people, the Irish? Or a homogenised, sanitised commodity hawked by a multi-national conglomerate? Is it a mass-produced beer that is mostly pretty good wherever you order it? Or a finely tuned craft product that needs nurturing like a rare orchid, mindful of esoteric considerations of nitrogen levels, line length, and a baffling two-part pouring process? These are questions, perhaps, that even the most sentient AI would struggle to answer. For when you gaze long into the Guinness, the Guinness also gazes back at you.
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With yet another Zuckerberg film on the horizon, the tech world’s favourite disruptors are once again under the spotlight, here are the five portrayals that captured their brilliance, delusion and everything in between.
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