New Guinness Brewery On Tap In Maryland

To bring a beer tour and tasting experience to its customers, Guinness has opened a $90 million brewery in Maryland. The location is the company’s first new brewery in 60 years, CNBC reported.

The brewery, which is located just outside of Baltimore, may bring in 300,000 visitors a year to its facilities, which are said to include a brew house, restaurant, tap room and gift shop. (The property itself has been owned by Guinness parent Diageo since 2001). Many of the taproom’s beers will be brewed on the property.

For now, visitors can tour the site on their own, but guided tours are set to be available in September. To that end, Brewers Association Chief Economist Bart Watson said that the brewery highlights the importance of a tasting room and tour: “It’s important to have that experiential connection to beer,” he told CNBC.

Only one of Guinness’ five breweries is located in its home country of Ireland. Referencing a report from Britain’s The Telegraph, the outlet notes that while the average total amount of Guinness imbibed worldwide on most days of the year is around 7.6 million glasses, that number nearly doubles on St. Patrick’s Day, reaching an average in excess of 13 million glasses.

PJ Media shared that the O’Neill’s chain of Irish-themed pubs in Britain expected to sell more than 71,000 pints of the famous stout on St. Patrick’s Day 2016, while — according to Nielsen data — in the United States, overall sales of Irish beers (including Guinness) see a rise throughout the month of March.

St. Patrick’s Day, the outlet notes, is becoming ever more important to Guinness, as its sales are otherwise on the decline and its market share is being cut into – in particular, by the continued rise in popularity of craft beers. “Diageo must look beyond [one-day] occasions for stout consumption,” Amin Alkhatib, alcoholic drinks analyst at Euromonitor International, commented. “It must promote wider drinking occasions for the tipple and capture demand from undersold consumer groups, such as female drinkers.”