Mark This! is a podcast in which we peel back the corporate curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs, and projects that are happening all over Aramark’s varied lines of business. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them--building opportunity, building innovation, and building community.
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Mark This! Podcast: Episode 30: March is for Guinness
Host: Heather Dotchel, Corporate Communications
It is time to "Mark This!", a podcast in which we peel back the corporate curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs, and projects that are happening all over Aramark's varied lines of business.
I'm Heather Dotchel. As a member of Aramark's Communications team, I see and hear amazing things that are happening across our company every day. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them, building opportunity, building innovation, and building community. It is March and St. Patrick's Day is around the corner. In both Ireland and the US, home of many of Irish heritage, it is a cherished holiday, and in both, we have Guinness Destinations proprietor of the iconic Stout, and more than 260 years of brewing experience. So today, pull up a chair, a pint, and learn about our locations and their St. Patty's Day plans.
We are lucky enough to be joined by John Gilbert, Director of Operations of our Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Maryland, and Donna Doyle, Director of Operations at our original Dublin landmark, the Guinness Storehouse.
John, we will start as we always do, by inviting you to tell us a bit about yourself.
Well, thank you so much for inviting me to join this podcast today. My name is John Gilbert. I have been in restaurants and hospitality my entire life. My grandparents owned a restaurant and I can remember visiting from a very young age and seeing the cooks and the chefs in the kitchen, and I've been hooked ever since. Now I am 40 years old or young, and I'm still as passionate today as I was the first time I stepped into a kitchen. So, I worked a lot in Michelin starred restaurants and luxury hotels for the Four Seasons and various restaurateurs. And I joined Aramark about six years ago. I haven't looked back and I've been having a blast ever since.
Donna, we appreciate you participating from across the ocean. Can you also introduce yourself?
Thanks Heather, and thank you for inviting me to be part of Mark This! Podcast. I'm delighted to be here. I joined Aramark a year ago this month, actually, and I'm super excited to be supporting the teams here in the home of Guinness. Aramark have actually been the hospitality partners here for almost 25 years, and that's the number of years I've been in the hospitality industry. So, very similar to you, John. I've spent a very variety from retail to bring in a franchise to the Republic of Ireland, to work in a new store, opens new store, set-ups, and like you, John, hospitality is my prior passion. I absolutely love it and heading on 26 years in the industry.
And outside of that, my three children, my two doggies, and my hubby keep me busy at home.
Donna, can you give us a snapshot of the Dublin Guinness Storehouse as a destination unto itself in Ireland?
Okay, so the Guinness Storehouse is a cultural attraction telling the story of one of Ireland's most loved brands, Guinness. It's located in the heart of Dublin's Liberties, an area renowned for its brewing and distilling history. We have visitors from Ireland and abroad who get to discover what goes into making each pint. They learn about the incredible brand history which stretches over 265 years, its iconic advertising ingredients, the brewing process, and not forgetting the Guinness taste and experience that's like no other.
In 2024, the Guinness Storehouse welcomed 1.65 million visitors from over 200 markets worldwide. And since we opened in 2000, it has welcomed over 25 million visitors. This year is actually the 25th anniversary of Guinness Storehouse, and there's lots of exciting plans throughout the year marking a celebration of culture and community. The experience itself unfolds across seven floors, including the highlight for many visitors, the famous Gravity Bar. You can enjoy panoramic 360-degree views of Dublin City that is unparalleled. The Guinness Storehouse was also voted the world's leading tourist attraction in 2023, the world's leading beer tour visitor experience in 2024, and it is also Ireland's number one visitor attraction.
Only last week our team recently scooped the Event Impact Awards and for the last two years, we've won best MICE Events Venue, so an impressive lineup and something to be very, very proud of.
So, I can attest to the fantastic views in the Gravity Bar and the great pint there. And I think my favorite of the seven floors after the Gravity Bar, of course though, was the marketing floor. I loved seeing all of the historical ads and everything for Guinness.
John, I think many people do not realize that there's a US location in the Baltimore area. I've been to the Dublin Storehouse, I've not been to you just a couple of hours south of me. I'll need to rectify that as soon as possible, so we'll have to connect after the podcast.
But can you tell us about our Baltimore Open Gate Brewery, please?
Yeah, it's a really special location, Guinness decided to build this visitor experience on the site of Maryland's first whiskey distillery after prohibition. So, it's a historical site that dates back to the thirties. It is a site full of old whiskey Rickhouses is where they would store the whiskey while it was aging, and they converted one of those buildings into the visitor experience and kept a lot of the charm from the thirties Rickhouse, but pulled in some elements from Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. So, you'll see some hints back to Ireland, but also a sense of place in Maryland and the United States, which I love that Guinness really focused on that because it bridges the gap between the US and Ireland. And it's no secret that I think the storehouse sees more US visitors than any other visitor, so it just made sense to build this brewery in the United States.
We're a little bit different than the storehouse in that we are a pilot brewery or an innovation brewery. So, we started off with a 10-barrel brewing system and we took a lot of the brewing culture from the American craft beer movement, we pulled a lot of awesome brewers in and started dreaming up all these really cool innovative beers that we still have the iconic Stout and it's our number one seller, and that's what everybody comes and enjoys. But with their visit, they get to try all these new and cool ideas from all of the talented brewers that Guinness employs. The first year we saw over 400,000 visitors, which blew everyone's expectations out of the water, and we've been on fire ever since. It's a great community partner within Maryland. We're very close to Washington DC and Baltimore. We're situated a little bit in the middle between the two cities, right next to the airport and Amtrak.
So, we see a great deal of tourists and the locals in the community visiting us. It's an awesome experience. You can get a tour that goes into the brewing process or the history of Guinness. You can learn about the Guinness family. You can sit down and have a tasting where you go through the iconic Stout and then the innovative beers that we have at the moment. We employ some really talented tour and experience guides and a really talented group of culinarians, if you would call them that, to really provide this really dynamic experience for the visitor and really interact with the brand in a really forward way.
It's a proud moment for me. It's no secret, I don't know if you'll touch on it, but Guinness Stout is having a moment, that's what we call it here in the States, I don't know how you refer to it in Ireland, but it's just on fire, the brand. And where you didn't used to see a lot of young people drinking Stout, you go to a bar or a restaurant and it's 22, 23 year olds that are ordering Guinness Draft Stout now, so it's really cool to be a part of that moment in the United States. So yeah, that's a little bit about us.
I need to come visit too, John.
Yeah, anytime! You're all invited!
Come on over! But do you have half pints, John? Because that is the thing I loved most in Ireland is getting a half pint because I drink a little slowly on the pint and then it gets...
Yes, we have half pints, we little pints, that's what we'll call them.
Fantastic! I actually bought my own set for my house because we are big Guinness fans in my house.
Well, great. Yeah, I had somebody from California reach out to me about half pints, so I get it. People, they want them, yeah.
Donna, what does St. Patrick's Day celebrations look like in Ireland? What are we doing to mark March at the Storehouse?
It's St. Patrick's week at the Guinness Storehouse, and it's one of the busiest weeks of the year, one of my favorite weeks of the year. Last year was amazing, but to visit the home of Guinness in Ireland, definitely throughout St. Patrick's week is a bucket list for many of our visitors. I don't know how many people would say this has been on my list to do for years and John, a lot of Americans would be saying that.
So this year, for March the 14th, the home of Guinness will open its doors to visitors from all over the world to come and enjoy a taste of world-class modern Irish sociability and culture featuring live music, storytelling, bespoke art installations, and of course, our beautiful points of Guinness and Guinness 0.0. We've got a primary event space, the Arrol Suite and we transformed that into a hope for showcasing the best of Irish talent with hundreds of live music acts across the five days; dancers and performers will take to the stage. And it's an amazing immersive experience for visitors to really embed themselves in the culture while they enjoy their pints with family and friends.
Same question for you, John. How will our Baltimore brewery celebrate the month with our community?
Well, I don't want top Ireland, but we shoot for a whole month, not just a week, a lot of time and energy into really providing an immersive experience for our visitors. It's a huge holiday here in the United States, a really fun holiday. It's a sense of getting with your family and friends and celebrating just life, really. That's what it's about. And for the brand, we've taken an original idea that came out of 2020 during the COVID era of building an Irish village, and it's just grown every year. It's gotten larger and more detailed and more intense from a planning and execution standpoint. So, we essentially put up huge tents, two tents actually, and build an Irish village into that tents with different booths and experiences within those tents.
If my team listens to this, they'll laugh because my big thing is a fountain. I wanted a fountain last year, so we have a massive fountain in the middle of the tents and you get to stop by and have all these different food experiences. I know we spoke about Chef Hunter from the Storehouse. He joined us last year and taught us all how to make his famous fish and chips. So, we have a booth for Lord Hunter's fish and chips where it's his recipe and we execute that for all of our visitors, live music, bands all day long. It's really a fun experience no matter what day you visit in March, it's going to feel like St. Patrick's Day on that day.
And that allows us to be able to give that experience to many, many more visitors than who can just visit us in one day. This year we're actually working on a special project based off of two pop-ups we did. We did pop-ups with the Guinness brand team in both Boston and New York this past holiday season where they unveiled this tiny pub where somebody walking by on the street can pop in and get a little sample of the draft Stout.
They got a little cookie along with it, but we built this experience in the middle of Manhattan, in the middle of Boston. And so we saw the engagement with that tiny pub. So, we're working on that for this year. It's a special experience that you can book through a ticket. We're building a very small pub, very authentic, and we've obtained old flooring and old windows and doors, and we've reached out to the archive team with the Storehouse to get old posters and advertisements to put on the wall, and you can come in and experience the connoisseur experience in this tiny pub with four other people and it's going to be really cool and something we're very proud of. We're working towards launching that here on March 1st.
Amazing. Sorry, but I love Lord Hunter. I will be going straight to [inaudible 00:14:12]. I'm sorry, Hunter [inaudible 00:14:15].
It's going to get a lot of laughs. Yeah, he did a special TV spot for us where he went on the news and taught everybody how to make his fish and chips last year, and we gave him his own booth. I don't know, he's not going to be happy about that one that we gave, but we named his booth that. But it makes me smile too that you said that, yeah.
Oh, well, clearly everybody around here knows how to have fun. John, before I ask Donna back about the Storehouse, what else do you have going on this year that you'd like to highlight outside of St. Patty's Day?
Oh, is there anything else? No. We do a lot within the community. We do beer festivals. We did an art festival last year. I'm also really proud of... We sit right next to the Patapsco Valley State Park, which is I believe one of the largest state parks in the country. It's the most used state park in the country. I know that from in terms of people entering the park. And we border that and we've been a really great partner with them throughout the years. And we decided last year to do a race, so a foot race. We're doing a 5K and a 10K this year where the runners will run into the park and they come out of the park after the race and finishing a Guinness and all the proceeds go to the park.
So those community events where we get a different type of visitor, maybe someone that wouldn't visit the brewery, gets to experience it in the terms of running a foot race, and we will do a bike race in June or July. Then we celebrate Oktoberfest. And that's a big beer holiday though. It's not Irish, but people really come to the brewery and enjoy those special, what we would call tent pull events, and they make a great impact on the community and the local community that comes and visits us.
Oh, that's great. Donna, in Dublin, so outside of St. Paddy's Day, the rest of the year, what are you most excited about that's going on at the Storehouse?
There's so much going on. Well, I'm excited about two things. So I'm going to chat about a campaign, Alive in 25, and then I'm going to chat or take you through the hospitality transformation project afterwards. So, the Guinness Storehouse has big plans for its 25th anniversary, and we're marking this special occasion with a year-long celebration of creativity and community. Can't say too much at this point, but definitely watch the space. But the campaign, Alive in 25, will reflect the vibrancy and energy of our customers, the community, and the culture. We're super excited to showcase the incredible talents and creativity that Ireland has to offer and continuing to build a meaningful legacy in our local Dublin 8 and beyond.
The St. Patrick's Week celebrations will be the kickoff point for this campaign, and there'll be lots of exciting news coming through the year. So definitely keep an eye on our website and social media.
Guinness-Storehouse.com. And I think what has been a huge lift for us and the Aramark and Seasons team, the last couple of months has been our hospitality transformation project. There has been a significant investment in all of our food and beverage offers throughout the Guinness Storehouse. Our vision, where great beer needs great food, that's in our mission where beer and great food meets will come to life. I think our key consideration when redesigning the fifth floor offering was to make sure we satisfied our guests and catered to every taste and budget while bringing the best of Irish hospitality to life. We've got four dining spaces here within the home of Guinness.
Archer's, a quintessential modern Irish pub with Guinness distinct character. So in here, you'll find top pints with top bar bites, snacks, share plates, and I suppose our take on casual pub classics. We've got 1837 Bar & Dining. This is a sophisticated dining space celebrating Ireland's culinary heritage. In here, it's elevated, a little bit experimental. We celebrate the best of Ireland's soil, sea, and land. It is Irish produce led with a seafood grill and veg focus. Market Street, this is our casual global inspired kitchen. It's an all-day dining experience that takes guests around the world from breakfast right through to early evening. It's casual, it's accessible, and has a hybrid service style. Sean Hunter, our exec chef, has crafted beautiful menu for all our spaces.
As we know, Aramark really committed to partnering with suppliers who operate the highest standards, and we want to continuously work with new and emerging suppliers on a national level that will bring the best quality sustainably and locally sourced ingredients to our menus. One fact for us, we procured more than 50 million Irish products last year, and we're continuing to grow that. It's something that we, at Aramark, are very, very proud of. So all this will be ready to showcase in May of this year, and we cannot wait to bring it to everybody here.
Well, happy anniversary to the team! Please let them know that we are very excited for everything that's coming up.
Yes, John, I'll have to get you over, too.
Yeah, I'm perfectly happy to pop on over for some celebration.
And speaking of excitement and celebration, I'd like to close this out by putting John on the spot. I've heard we might have an announcement to share.
Yeah. I'm actually sitting in Chicago at our Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Chicago, and Aramark just became majority partners of the food and beverage operations here. Guinness trusts us so much from Baltimore that they put us here. It's been about a year and a half since they opened, and we're here to help them on their journey here in Chicago and create the same experience that we've done in Baltimore here in Chicago.
So, we're expanding with the Guinness brands. It's anchored definitely in Dublin, and as we expand in the United States, it's awesome to be a partner alongside Guinness and help them grow their brand.
Fantastic. Want to know more about the Guinness locations? Visit our newsroom on Aramark.com to access more information. I'm so glad our listeners could join us again, and we thank John and Donna for helping us to "Mark This!".
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