my goodness, my guinness is expensive

on drink rationing and blue-collar cosplay

“It takes a thirst for adventure to do things the Guinness way.”

The Guinness website boldly declares this ahead of a brief and punchy history of the iconic Irish beer, for which founder Alexander Guinness took out a 9000-year lease at St. James Gate Brewery in Dublin. Guinness is a heavy, malty, creamy stout, a drink that continues to fascinate me in its cultural, economic, and social histories. How Guinness navigates its cultural role through time as a drink of working men, rebels, or now through young women maps on to new meanings in pop cultural and globalized economies.

As a tradition, Guinness represents both a drink and a business, with its fair share of narrative and historical controversies. While acknowledged as a national emblem for Ireland, more recent campaigns to drink Guinness have been nestled in celebrity and social media, leading to drink shortages in some U.K. pubs and pint rationing over Christmas. These have cascaded into concerns about the future of Guinness price in Ireland, and the role of Gen Z nostalgia in creating a dumpster fire of consumption.

The role of tradition in trend can elevate the idea of nostalgia toward working-class values in recession-era consumption. Where is the line between celebrating and co-opting the food and drink of the working class during a cost-of-living crisis?

splitting the g

Guinness shortages in the U.K. this past December became so pressing that some pubs began handing out ration cards. To ration, conceptually, invokes a particular type of access-panic, reminiscent not only of COVID-19 era restrictions on toilet paper, active yeast, and dried beans, but also WWII rationing. Could it really be so bad as to enact the strategies of wartime?

This felt particularly silly given that the shortages were primarily attributed to social media challenges across TikTok and other platforms. Some can be attributed to the “Split the G” challenge, where patrons try to take a first gulp that gets the line between the beer and the head halfway up the letter “G” in a branded pub pint. There is also the “tilt test,” where drinkers tilt a Guinness to 45 degrees to see if the drink is up to its quality standard (the thinking goes that if nothing spills out, it’s a good creamy pour).

Celebrity galvanizes these efforts: John Cena and the Jonas Brothers aim to take a first sip that would balance out somewhere around the “G” on the Guinness pint. Kim Kardashian and Olivia Rodrigo use the beverage as social clout, posting photos of dainty sips and holding pints. Irish actress Eve Hewson (of Bad Sisters) shared a grainy, high-fashion photoshoot wearing a luxury Guinness sweater—which ran for about 1200 pounds. The infusion of celebrity attention to a 265-year-old drink feels fresh and nostalgic all at once, perfectly marketed to a generation that takes comfort in 90s iconology.

With the jolt of attention that comes with a TikTok challenge or a large platform push, it is unsurprising that Guinness consumption is up despite otherwise poor sales for its parent company, Diageo. Recent marketing campaigns for Guinness have been aimed at attracting new consumers, seeing a 24% increase in sales by women. While mainly adopted by American and British drinkers, the intention behind these new forms of influence plays into a much longer history of Guinness having nearly ingenious marketing.

guinness is good for labourers?

As a hugely successful Irish brand, Guinness has been built in a specific, and arguably calculated way to ensure its continued regional and global success. In a conversation for The Irish History Podcast, Finn Dwyer and guests Eion Tabb and DJ Walsh share a need to distinguish between Guinness as a cultural product and Guinness as a business (and family). Despite its worldwide success, the Guinness narrative is complex, and there are controversies around the family, the drink, and the company.

In the early days of Guinness’s factory, Ireland’s working class moved away from farming to industrial labour and set shift work. With this, more traditional Irish forms of drinking, like whisky, were harder to safely maintain (which I’m sure some whisky-drinkers-on-the-job learned the hard way). At Guinness, workers were known to be treated well and allotted two pints per shift. As Dwyer suggests, this allowance would suggest that the uptake in beer drinking revolved around these economic restructures in 19^th-century Ireland.

Where it gets more complicated is how Guinness (the company) provided a working environment, and for whom. There is, as Dwyer says, a “real cynicism” that informs these efforts. While it may be seen as the drink of Irish rebels, the Guinness company notoriously didn’t hire Catholics for “prominent” or “well-paying positions.” There were whispers of the Guinness family being loyal to the British, despite their support of Dublin and its workers. When it came to the brand, these less apparent ideologies didn’t always transfer directly onto the product or the messaging around it. Instead, as Eionn Tab says, the Guinness factory workers’ drinking allowance served as the marketing:

“you’re marketing the brand itself… if you have people working there, they’re loving it, they’re getting a couple of free pints as well, they’re going around telling their mates that Guinness is great.”

This messaging birthed the idea that Guinness is good for you, something you drink for strength. A pint in place of a whisky was more sustainable throughout the day. In such a rural environment, Ireland and its farmers were deeply established in manual labour, and the idea of a pint being good for you mapped onto the idea of hard work, strength, providing for your family, and getting your work done.

That a drink of the industrial working class would become a global phenomenon makes sense, given the longstanding efforts of the Guinness family and business to weave a story of a drink. Yet culture shifts, and the idea of quiet luxury and new/old money now dominates our doom-scrolls, hiding the conditions most working class find themselves (deemed unaesthetic, maximalist, cluttered, etc.).

In this context, proximity to Guinness is a way to cosplay blue-collar lifestyles. Why else would Kim Kardashian intentionally pose with a Guinness, if not to receive some admiration for appealing to middle-class lifestyles in a cost-of-living crisis? Sure, she may have told people to get their fucking asses up and work, but she gets it. She’s of the people, clearly. Guinness glamorization is a cultural knot to work out: there’s an embedded problem of unsustainable Western food cycles amplifying through online and celebrity.

guinness economy

At its most absurd, the Guinness rationing led to a group of Brits stealing 400 kegs off shipping trucks, equating to around 35,000 pints. The amount taken is staggering—to drink that much would be an impossible feat, and I’ve seen my Irish family out-compete most people who come within our radius at a wedding. The type of demand social media surges cause is rabid, made possible thoroughly because of internet accelerations of accessibility. Click-and-buy mindsets make for smooth acquisitions until everyone is demanding the same product. Food waste is an ongoing issue, but the ephemerality of internet trends drives more pronounced impacts on land, regional economies, and workers.

To meet the U.K. demands over Christmas, Guinness reserves in Ireland were pulled from. This was coupled with the announcement in Ireland that the cost of Guinness could increase in 2025 by 30% (including VAT, pub, and duty margins), which would place it around 6 euros outside of Dublin, and over 7 euros in the major centre. Pat Crotty, the CEO of Vintners Federation of Ireland (an organization that represents pubs outside of the Dublin area), warned that these rising costs mean more economic trouble for smaller, community pubs:

“Publicans are being squeezed from every angle—rising energy costs, higher wages and government-imposed changes.”

Splitting the G is a trend in isolation, but these economic squeezes are layered onto ongoing concerns after COVID-19 on small pubs, energy transitions, and government policy changes.

When I started looking further into this in early January 2025, most of the news articles covering it looked purely at the shortage, its impact on Irish and British pubs, and the celebrity of it all. Now, though, I’m curious if the hype was intentional, manufactured. More recent rumours through Bloomsbury News suggested that Diageo may have been exploring the options to sell its Guinness and Moet Hennessy holdings.

Diageo swiftly shut down these rumours, crediting increased global sales of Guinness (particularly its non-alcoholic variants) as crucial to its growth. Much conversation around Guinness in pop culture is in potential sales, circling its sudden and extraordinary appeal to women- and Gen Z-drinkers. Knowing that Guinness as a company thinks long and hard about its branding and marketing, this feels a little too on the nose. Yet the power of cultural capital, TikTok influencers, popular publicans (like Oisin Rogers), or claims of “best pour” being centralized to one Soho pub (The Devonshire) feel as though they’re pushing toward a means to an end.

The sudden popularity, shortages, and sensationalist rationing appear consistent with Guinness’s history, whispered controversies, and globalized commodification. Coupled with the use of celebrity to elevate nostalgic hype, this plays into a recession chic I’ve watched with fixed curiosity over the last few years. Is nostalgic conservativism carving a renewed appreciation for a working-class beverage, or is it profit-seeking behaviour by a multi-national beverage conglomerate? Does it matter if it’s a mix of both?

cosplaying blue collar

This idea of the collective nostalgia for a different era has been amplifying, leaning into conservative-Christian-white values around religion, gender roles, racialization, and class. Consider how Republican and conservative values have become embedded in conceptions of food systems. Trad wives, renewed vigour in concerns around adulterated and processed foods, and the high cost of being well in 2020s America situates food as a powerful time machine into the imagined past, though one removed of its usually progressive political bend.

As Daniel Marcus argues in Happy Days and the Wonder Years, the conservative use of nostalgia means that specific time periods become reified as opposing social environments. Ideas of decades solidified as time passed: 1950s modernity advances (housewives, refrigerators, frozen meals) in contrast to the 1960s (Black Panthers, feminist movements, opposition to the Vietnam War). These generalizations of decades get politically painted, used to advance the rhetoric and policy-building that scrapes back any advances to civil rights and liberties. It’s easy to look back at a time and call it the good ol’ days, but the question remains for who? (It’s straight white men, for the record).

Amidst the nostalgia, recession-friendly foods have surfaced and mingled with high fashion. At the 2023 London Fashion Week, an ill-thought-out Burberry pop-up restaurant positioned itself as blue-collar for a day. The pop-up diner offered hot dogs, nuggets, eggs, and chips (though with Burberry branding—elevated poor people foods, I suppose). Similarly, a temporary 2024 pop-up for a Canadian influencer event had YouTubers donning Carhartt working jackets and caps (as the wife of a tradesman, I could only laugh).

The Burberry cafe pop-up for London Fashion Week, 2023 (from @normanscafelondon)

It’s a strategy to look somewhat approachable but still rich: quiet luxury means loud wealth. As one social media user (@sipteawithmelissa) says of the Burberry pop-up, “Would everyone still be going into a greasy spoon caff if everything wasn’t Burberry branded?” While I appreciate that, there’s still the part of the internet that thinks pairing chicken nuggets with caviar will allow people to look more relatable as the world is burning.

Adjacent are recession-core food items remixed as trend: canned fish, butter boards, “enhanced” water, and instant coffee modified to meet a Millennial eye. This isn’t the Folgers of the 90s, but it’s trying to bridge the gap as affordability concerns rise. While they may not be outright trying to reach for the lower-income tax bracket, it’s an odd nod to further market interest in recession-era food items with modern luxury updates.

It’s as though working-class foods are fodder to normalize and further commodify their diluted offshoots of cheap, tinned foods, beers, and even water. Re-positioning food through value shifts does fit within a longer American history to repurpose social values with new economic conditions, though (as was seen with lobster being repurposed from sailor food to luxury in the late 1800s).

Maybe there’s more thirst for adventure with Guinness lately, but it seems extractive more than reliable. It would be easy to lambast it all, but Guinness is complex, a pint representing the ongoing legacy of carving perspectives out for the working class by the industry. And I guess for now, that means one where the G gets split at the cost of local pub culture.

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