For many years the dimensions of the business were but moderate. Wakefield, writing in 1809, states that Guinness was then only the second brewer in Ireland, Beamish and Crawford of Cork, who brewed upwards of 100,000 barrels a year, standing first. Without attempting to account for or to describe the advance, since Wakefield’s day, of the great Dublin firm (made a limited liability company in October, 1886), we may briefly notice one or two points of special interest connected with the manufacture. The materials used are absolutely confined to malt, pale and roasted, and hops. Of the latter a preference has always been shown for those of Kent, no other English varieties being used. But of late years American Hops have been largely consumed as well. The water for brewing is drawn from the City Watercourses, and not from the Liffey, as some people unacquainted with Dublin have supposed. It would be impossible here to describe in detail the process or the plant of the St. James’ Gate Brewery, and owing to the position held by the firm it seems almost unnecessary to say that every modern improvement of the Engineer and the Scientist, whether for facilitating the operations of Brewing or for ensuring the safety and welfare of those employed, has been carefully investigated and judiciously applied. The minute attention which is paid to every detail of the process, from the manufacture and selection of the malt, to the treatment and storage of the beer in every stage, is matched by the liberal provision made for the men engaged in the work and their families. To the visitor nothing is more astonishing than the size and number of the vats. Some of these huge erections of Oak and Iron contain no less than 90,000 gallons apiece; and to a lengthened storage in these is due in great measure the peculiar character of the Stout devoted to the foreign export trade. The tendency in most modern breweries has been to dispense with lengthened storage in vat. Not so here, and the erection of vats of great capacity has kept pace with the extension of the export trade. Another remarkable feature is the large provision of ice machines, {350} or rather of engines for the cooling, by the evaporation of ether and ammonia, of fluid brine, which circulates by a complicated system of copper pipes through every part of the vast storehouses, and ensures a winter temperature on the hottest summer day. It is the extent to which this system is applied that is so striking in this establishment, where all is on so vast a scale that the ordinary units of measurement seem inadequate to convey a notion of the truth. The same may be said of the multitude of mains by which the finished beer is conveyed from the storage vats, a distance of half a mile beneath one of the principal streets of the city, to the lower portion of the works where the beer is “racked” into cask.