Guinness needs head examined for new pour

On St. Patrick’s Day, while happily summoning all the Irish that’s in me, I spotted a newspaper story about a disturbing new trend being foisted on my ancestral home.

According to The Wall Street Journal, lovers of Guinness stout around the world are fomenting over their favorite foam. It seems that the famous Irish brewery has decided after 242 years in the business that the time-honored way of pouring a pint of the rich brown nectar takes too long for the modern, young pub crowds.

In a snub to tradition, Ireland’s impatient, upscale set has had it with waiting the two minutes it takes for the bartender to pour a proper pint – filling the glass three-quarters full and then letting it settle before topping it off with its creamy head. So Guinness is experimenting with a new pouring method that uses ultrasound to release bubbles into the stout, thereby forming the characteristic head in 15 to 20 seconds. The “slow pull,” so much a part of the Irish identity, may one day be a lost art.

“A two-minute pour is not relevant to our customers today,” said the head of Diageo, the conglomerate that owns Guinness.

Relevant or not, Guinness fans outside Ireland are thinking green but seeing red. They’re calling the speeded-up process blasphemy, and I’m inclined to agree. I’ve been to Ireland once, years ago, and have been trying to get back ever since. When I first was introduced to the “slow pull,” in a pub near Shannon, I thought I had done something to offend the bartender. I had no idea why he poured only part of my pint, set it aside, and then walked off to serve someone else. When he finally returned to my glass and finished pouring, I recorded the leisurely moment forever in my mental scrapbook of quaint Irish images that I hold dear to this day.

No matter how much the country may change, I refuse to give up the romantic perceptions of the place that are etched in my imagination. I don’t care that Ireland has been an economic success story in Europe, that hundreds of high-tech firms employ nearly 40,000 Irish workers, many of them young people who have better things to do than wait two minutes for their Guinness after a day writing computer software. I want Ireland to always be the quaint, simple, changeless and hauntingly beautiful place I remember, even if my memory is flawed.

As a longtime Maine resident, I guess I should know better than to impose my romantic notions on an entire population just to suit my fancy. Let’s face it, if there ever was a place with a mistaken national identity, it’s Maine. To the average, uninformed out-of-stater, we are and always will be a far-flung collection of lumberjacks and fishermen and little in between. When we’re not all felling trees in our plaid shirts and hobnail boots, we’re off shooting moose from ice floes. Several years ago, an unintentionally hilarious AT&T advertisement on TV portrayed a typical Maine lobsterman sitting in the fog at the end of a dock, mending a head net. Nice image, and quaint as the dickens, except for the part where the ad placed the crusty lobsterman in Bangor.

The most recent case of silly stereotyping showed up in a New Yorker magazine piece about the Marden’s discount chain filling its Maine outlets with luxury clothing from a New York City store damaged in the attacks on the World Trade Center. As I started reading the story, I had the sneaking suspicion that the writer would not be able to resist the old Maine cliches. Sure enough, there we were, we country folk, all rummaging through racks of Gucci, Armani and Versace while clad in our “L.L. Bean hunting boots.” And to make the image complete, the cartoon accompanying the article depicted a crusty lobsterman, in his slicker, contemplating the big-city merchandise with a bewildered “Ay-uh.”

Frankly, I’m getting tired of being terminally quaint. I wonder if all those leprechauns over in Ireland feel the same way.