Some stereotypes are true, some aren’t. The Irish like to drink: True. What were sidewalk café’s three to a corner in Paris are now pubs three to a corner in Dublin. This was driven home even further during our tour of the Guinness factory. Ten years ago when I was in Dublin I stayed at the Guinness Brewery hostel and took the tour, so I wasn’t expecting too much to have changed. Wrong. The entire thing has been completely redone and is now a 7 story monument to the rich creamy stout goodness. Complete with bar on top.

But our real Guinness tour started the night before. Our long time readers will remember Eddie and Bern from our trek through the Daintree Rain Forest in Austraila. We hit it off back then famously and ended up drinking ourselves into a coma in Port Douglas. We decided to take another crack at it here in their home town of Dublin. We met at Venu to start the festivities, which is a very hipster restaurant located a few floors underground in an old building off Grafton street. The food was quite good, and so was the wine.

The real treat, however, was after dinner when we were promised the “best pint of Guinness in Ireland”. Apparently Guinness themselves actually service all of the Guinness taps in Dublin, with the exception of the one located at John Kehoe which is meticulously cleaned by hand and the bartenders trained to pour a perfect head. It truly was “brilliant”. We ended up hanging out back at their very cool place until the late/early hours of the morning. As often is the case, we finished off by asking the cab driver to take us to the best Kebab place he knew of. And he did. And it was good.