The Search for God and Guinness

This is the story of Arthur Guinness and his famous dark beer.

Beer has been much more central to society than most people realize. One historian even speculates that the need for organized beer-making provided the original motivation for humans to group themselves together into stable agricultural settlements. And did you know that the Puritan ship Arbella carried with it over 10,000 gallons of beer for thirsty Pilgrims in the New World? No, I didn’t either. But so we learn in the first chapter.

And then we come to Arthur Guinness himself. He was not the first to brew a dark beer, but his father Richard perfected the recipe. Having learned his trade from his father, Arthur Guinness then opened the brewery in Dublin that would one day lead to the establishment of a global brand.

There’s more to this than a financial success story, though. Arthur Guinness was deeply Christian and one who walked his talk in both his charitable and his business endeavors. Not only this, but he passed his strong faith down through many generations in the form of his son John Grattan Guinness and his descendants. These were the nineteenth-century Guinness missionaries, preachers, and founders of charities.

Finally, we come to the twentieth century. Guinness begins to advertise for the first time and the famous dark beer goes global. In a concluding chapter, the author draws some moral maxims from the Guinness story — and very good they are, too.

Author Stephen Mansfield appears to be a man of immense energy — not only a writer but also a pastor, radio show host, and founder of a book packaging company. He writes with a down-to-earth sense of humor (and includes tourist snaps of himself at Guinness locations in Ireland!), and he marshals his facts with the sure touch of a master.

The results are splendid and throughly entertaining.

Stephen Mansfield. The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009. Hardcover. 304 pages. ISBN 1595552693. $24.99.