Earlier I overheard Laura telling her dad about my visit to Ireland late last year, and my subsequent road-to-Damascus Guinness conversion. “Now he drinks it all the time,” she declared, without judgement.

I judge her for this. Plainly I have become a walking cliché, attempting to disguise my humiliating predictability beneath an ill-advised religious metaphor. She ought to be embarrassed by our association, to gaze upon me with contempt, as though I were permanently adorning a foam St Patrick’s Day hat.

I went to Ireland holding the long-held belief that Stout was a daft drink generally only enjoyed by oddball elders who spent more time propping up the local Irish bar than they did in their own homes. Everyone else was faking it. They drank Guinness because they thought it was cool. No one actually liked it.

Admittedly Guinness is the most popular beer in the UK by some distance. But I was carrying around two truths from my formative years.

Firstly, that I did not think Guinness tasted nice, and therefore it seemed plausible to me that other people might secretly share this view. Secondly, that a number of people had remarked to me, sincerely, that a pint of Guinness was like a meal. That it filled you up. If true, that always seemed a ridiculous rationale for choosing it as your favoured pint. It reminded me of the line from the drugs episode of Brass Eye. “Some people say alcohol’s a drug. It’s not a drug, it’s a drink.”

And then, of course, that old adage that Guinness tastes better in Ireland. I’ve heard many different quasi-scientific explanations as to why this is genuinely the case. My own conviction, not entirely without factual merit, is that it may appear to taste better in Ireland because most other Irish beers are awful.

So what changed to make a self-confessed contrarian about turn and embrace the mainstream?

The truth is every bit as banal as Laura’s original anecdote. I sat down in a pleasantly dingy Irish bar in the small market town of Claremorris, decided that a Guinness was as good as any of the other choices available to me, and found to my surprise that I now liked the taste. And thus I find that I have become the sort of person whose opinion of Guinness was changed by going to Ireland. Still, as Men Behaving Badly once distilled into a guiding principle: if it’s wet, drink it.

Photo by Andrew Meßner on Unsplash