"Not just in terms of its connection with the beer and the connection with the family, but with Ireland. It is almost regarded as part of our heritage."
Pub owners say they still sell more Guinness than anything else, but as Ireland has joined the European Union and become a new center for banking and manufacturing, they face a clientele with more choices and broader interests.
"Eastern European products you never heard of, all of a sudden they are on the supermarket shelves," said Tom Cleary, who owns Kennedy's Pub in Dublin. "And I suppose the affluence brings about a certain snobbishness. In terms of, 'We were on holiday and drank this, why can't we get this beer in Ireland?'
"I've had people come to the counter and ask me for a bottle of Czech beer. They think it's different, it's new. But with all this affluence, they don't appreciate what's in front of them."
Now, no one's saying that a Saturday night in Dublin isn't still an intimidating and unforgettable event, with the sound of raucous laughter, swooning promenades down the street and occasional curbside regurgitations, followed, early Sunday morning, by the clatter of dozens of empty kegs being rolled down the sidewalks and onto waiting trucks.
Young Dubliners who made their first trip to the pub at their father's side as teenagers, receiving calm instruction in how to finish a pint of Guinness in seven neat swigs, still go when they can, but when has it ever been cool to drink your father's beer?
"Years ago, everybody drank Guinness," said David Donnelly, a 36-year-old Dubliner. "But young people don't drink Guinness. If I was going for a few drinks with me mates, we just drink Budweiser. Guinness is more of an old fellow's drink."
It is Guinness' fate to be so much better poured on draft at an Irish pub -- where kegs are tapped so often, they get renewed daily -- that a discriminating Irishman will drink it almost nowhere else. Sure, Guinness comes in a bottle or a can, its contents indistinguishable from the pub version to most beer drinkers, but not to those who've sucked on the black stuff since adolescence.
And there's plenty of choice now, even at the tap.
Here at Davy Byrnes, so crucial a fixture in Dublin that Leopold Bloom ordered a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy there in "Ulysses" -- "Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there" -- things have changed to the degree that one city pub review congratulates it for pouring "the finest pint of Budweiser in town!"
