Approximately 13 million pints of Guinness will be annihilated during this weekend’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities—enough to float 1,000 drift boats in a tidal wave of water, hops, yeast, malted barley, and a fifth fishy ingredient called isinglass.
Isinglass is a gelatin-like substance made from fish bladders used to clean the robust black brew in the vat. If you’re thirsty for fish, pop a Guinness and get your fix—albeit a small one.
Via NEWSFIX: “All the unwanted leftovers get stuck together and then everything (fish guts and all) gets whisked out of the batch of beer, possibly leaving only traces of the fishy stuff in the stout.
Does this affect the final flavor of the beer?… NO. Will the sale of Guinness flounder this St. Patty’s Day? Probably not!”
Cheers.
Tom Bie is the founder, editor, and publisher of The Drake. He started the magazine in 1998 as an annual newsprint publication based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He then moved it to Steamboat, Colorado (1999), Boulder, Colorado (2001), and San Clemente, California (2004), as he took jobs as managing editor at Paddler, Senior Editor at Skiing, and Editor-in-Chief at Powder, respectively. Tom and The Drake are now both based in Denver, Colorado, where The Drake is finally all grows up(Swingers, 1996) to a quarterly magazine.