Some folks end up in the coolest food and beverage jobs you can imagine. Mario Batali, the great American Italian cuisine chef, owns upwards of 20 restaurants worldwide and travels to cook and keep tabs on his far-flung kitchens. Or Andrew Knowlton, the BA Foodist, is sent out into the culinary world to scout out what's hot and yummy on the food scene and write about it all over the pages of bon appetite magazine (his most recent article conveys some sadness that the school his kid goes to doesn't allow for pb&j sandwiches due to the possibility of peanut allergies. Their solution: a retro pb&j night every month at the Knowlton household...) My favorite job though comes from Reading Guinness: The 250-year Quest for the Perfect Pint, by Bill Yenne.
The book tracks the history of the Guinness family dynasty and those evolving brewing techniques that created what has become the longest continuing brewing operation in the world, which now creates the most recognizable and popular single brand (draught in the can, porter in the bottle) of beer known. By the turn of the 18th to 19th century, Arthur Guinness, Son & Company, Limited "eclipsed all others to become the largest brewing company in the world. Annual output increased to 1.58 million barrels in 1888 and to 2.08 million in 1899. By 1909, the volume was up to 2.77 million, and in 1914, on the eve of WWI, it stood at 3.54." Only approx. half of all of this production stayed in Ireland; the rest was shipped from St. James Gate in Dublin
around the world, including to such heavy import areas as Australia, the U.S. (Boston became an early favorite) and a bunch in Africa (Nigerians love their Guinness). The niche jobs that came from all of these exports was the need for "travelers, men who would literally travel to places where the product was being sold to check on the quality." In other words, a handful of beer savvy guys (J.C. Haines, an original traveler, was a brewer himself), travelled around the world sipping beers in cool pubs. Haines observed on one of his trips that "Nearly all the good class bars, cafes, epicures (grocers), and hotels keep Guinness. I examined about 40 samples at Cairo, 25 Alexandria, 10 each Tantah and Zagazig, and 15 in Port Said, and although a few may have been a year or more in bottle...in no case did I find beer which I would think required withdrawing from the market."
To make the job sound like it was more than sipping and traveling, they would report back with studious remarks like Arthur T. Shand's report of his 1904 travels to South Africa who said his role was "To obtain information as to the general conditions of trade; to gain knowledge of the most important of our bottlers doing business there; condition of stout after undergoing the severe climatic test, inseparable to sending the articles so far; ....as to whether we have competition; as to whether there was any trace of fraud or imitation of our trademark or label, and the prospects of our trade in the future."
The travel was no doubt rigorous to places like the south of France and the effects of those long ocean voyages through hot and cold weather took its toll, but in the case of tracking The "Black Liquid," the job must go on.
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