The pint of no return

On almost winning an Irish pub

Guinness is what they serve in places where scoring is for darts and getting lucky means a pint on the house.

Mark Brown
Winning entry from the Guinness “Win Your Own Pub in Ireland” Contest, 1996

“I don’t think this is working,” said the bartender, clearly not accustomed to pulling pints at 8 a.m. He’d filled to overflowing a shot glass—a shot glass, I repeat—with the nitrogenized froth from a tap of Guinness pub draught.

“You might try one of those,” I said, pointing to a beer glass if not a pint glass and certainly not a Guinness glass. What could one expect in a place called Bourbon Street?

The guys from KJRH began setting up. One of them clipped a mic under my shirt collar. The monitor lit up. “How about that jambalaya!” said the talking head back on Brookside. 

The only other place in town that served Guinness on tap was Hoffbrau—where the boys of Burn Co. now smoke pig—and they wouldn’t be up at this hour. A year later, the Snooty Fox would open in the old Fox Hotel (now the Tavern) with Guinness on tap, only they pumped it through a device designed more for bitter. Instead of a creamy head, you got a pile of loose foam reminiscent of a Dad’s Root Beer.

For beer beer, it was a time of dearth, Biblical, pre-historic, the era of Foster’s and Corona. Not even Arnie’s was serving pub draught, an almost unconscionable thought. For a St. Patrick’s party that year, a friend and I drove just over the border in Arkansas, to buy up all the pub draught cans we could find. We found around 30.

Out of this mess I managed to become the Zone 7 finalist in the 1996 Guinness “Win Your Own Pub in Ireland” contest, Zone 7 being the swath of turf stretching from Minnesota to Texas. My closest competitors were guys from Cleveland and Denver. The rest were strung along the coasts. Promotionally speaking, Oklahoma was the back of beyond. Hence the TV crew. But then, who wouldn’t want to own, or at least win, an Irish pub?

I’d entered the contest two months earlier, filling out the phrase “Guinness is …” on the back of a postcard entry form. Fifty words or less was the stipulation. I took 19.

I had to write Steve Largent, then a congressman, to help expedite my passport. Thankfully, he wasn’t off in the woods without his phone. In May, we boarded a plane for Kennedy Airport, then another for Dublin. On the overnight flight, we drank all the beer on hand, every last can. Through the restless, 10-hour leg came the consistent hiss of another can being cracked. 

Joe O’Connor, our driver, pulled up in front of Temple Bar, Dublin City. Three days in Dublin, to prime the pump. The business of the contest was days and counties away. This was the happy prelude. “Hurry up, folks,” the driver said. “Pubs close at half-eleven.”

A Guinness rep strode the aisle of the tour bus, handing out 20-pound notes. Being paid to drink beer does wonders for brand loyalty. The 20 of us, ten contestants and their mates, climbed off the bus and into the pubs. Two nights of pints not soon forgotten: drinking among the grizzled men of the Bachelor Inn; in the snugs of Doheny & Nesbitt, on Baggot Street, a block off Stephen’s Green; on Fleet Street at the Victorian-era Palace Bar; and closing the hotel bar at the Berkeley Court, where the cream on the head stood a good two inches. 

Mid-week, Joe turned the bus southward, past Cashel, Tipperary and Limerick, postcard-pretty and pint-friendly. The entire of south Ireland is a pub, and the round signs pitching another Guinness a guzzling game of connect the dots.

That harp in the Guinness logo is Brian Boru’s harp, Brian Boru being the High King of Ireland at the turn of the first millennium, Kincora being his castle keep in Killaloe, County Clare. Little Killaloe was home to The Seanachaoi, our final destination, the place one of us would be getting the keys to. You could see the Shannon from the porch, and the men in boats trolling for pike and salmon in the gray dusk.

Guinness Imports scouted the countryside for such places, the Irish equivalents of Idabel and Barnsdall—peaceful, picturesque and poor. Each town, however wee, had at least one bar, more likely six. A restaurant, maybe, and a sad little shop that would sell you sundries and post your letters. To win your own pub in Ireland, you had to hit a dartboard, draw a pint of beer with some aplomb, and give a speech addled by alcohol. To own your own pub, which one of us soon would, you had to be young, restless and naïve.

That afternoon, I sat on a bench with my girlfriend of a solid year watching the river run. The bench was small and we fit snugly.

“What if I win …” I said.

“What if you win?” she said, the future balanced precariously on the tip of her tongue.

The night before the throwdown, bouncing back and forth across the bridge from Killaloe to neighboring Ballina, we drank pints and made new friends. The burg was abuzz: The Yanks were in town to take the pub. Two of our crew, New Jersey Mike and his drinking pal Scummy, nearly came to blows with a pair of locals puffing their chests. We pulled anchor and crossed the bridge yet again to Molly’s, where a local pop band played covers. In front of the small stage, an infant slept peacefully in a stroller.

As did I that night, swaddled in my hop-and-barley blanket.

While I didn’t see a single dartboard in all of Dublin, the first feat of fitness was a round, held in the sunlit upstairs of the Seanachaoi itself. (My first toss ended up in the scoreless black, two inches from the wood paneling of the bathroom wall.) We went downstairs to pull pints and I got butterflies. The pints of the practice round had little bubbles in the cream. “Poxy,” they call it. When it counted, I pulled something similar, maybe a little prouder of the rim, but still pockmarked. Actor Eddie Burns, two years out from “Saving Private Ryan,” who was celebrity-judging the event, took a swig and gave a shrug that seemed to say, “It’ll do.”

As he drank, I told a story about all of the Guinness in Oklahoma. A very short story, indeed.

I was in second place after round two, officially. Unofficially, I was feeling bloated and anxious. When I went back of the bar for the last round to orally essay the nobility of Arthur Guinness, I felt no magic. My lines were tepid and clichéd and I won’t repeat them here. There’s a copy of it in a folder labeled “Guinness” in my filing cabinet of spent dreams and unfinished things.

And that was as close as I got. A poetic woman from Portland (of course) won. In hindsight, a blessing. I’m better, I find, on this side of the bar.

The tides have since turned against me. Ale does not settle well on a stomach tuned to other quaff. I’ll drink the odd beer now and then, mainly saving up for summer in Colorado, where ale seems to have found its Valhalla. Fruity, hoppy, gloriously golden things—a far cry from the so-called “blonde in the black skirt.” 

In the heady spring of ’96, though, Guinness was the grail and I was Percival, making road trips to Siloam Springs and pledging allegiance to Roy Keane, Shane MacGowan and anything else reeking of Irishness. I still get annoyed when I see it spelled “Guiness” on a menu. That’s one takeaway. 

Another is ten friendships, now fading in the 20-year abyss. Rick, the contestant from Denver, died before the millennium, run over changing his tire on a New York freeway. Nate Quinn from Brewster on Cape Cod—Nate the Great, a lobster fishermen who starred in a “Deadliest Catch” knockoff—passed a few years ago. His father, Walter, will sometimes send me poems clipped from pages of The New Yorker.

The last takeaway is a recurring dream. It haunts me less and less the farther I get from that day of reckoning. In the dream, I am in Dublin, it is near closing time, and for the life of me I can’t find Davy Byrne’s famous pub. Not surprising, given that I’ve never actually been to Davy Byrne’s. Only in my dreams. The cobbled streets lead to nowhere, the creaking walls close in, and before I arrive for the pint of my life, I awaken, not with a thirst but a hunger.

For more from Mark, read his review of Tulsa's (sort of) secret speakeasy.