Brains Black lines up against Guinness on St Patrick’s Day

BRAINS’ latest pint will face its biggest challenge yet tomorrow as it goes up against the market leader on St Patrick’s Day.

After being introduced to pubs last week, the big test for Brains Black will come tomorrow when it squares up to Ireland’s national drink – Guinness.

Darren Latchford, an Irish barman at The Halfway public house in Pontcanna, which was one of the first places to stock the pint, said: “People seem to be enjoying it.

“Its biggest competition is obviously Guinness but as Brains Black is 20p cheaper, some people are quite happy to switch in order to save a bit of money.

“As for St Patrick’s Day, it is going to be a fair competition but any new stout is going to struggle against Guinness on St Patrick’s Day.”

Brian Francis, secretary of the Cardiff branch of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), said: “It’s not a bad replication of the original product, and Brains seem to have got the yeast and barley content about right.

Brains Black in the Halfway, Pontcanna

“I think it will compete quite well with Guinness because of its price – Guinness is a rather expensive drink.”

Brains Black is still not cheap when compared to other lagers and ales on sale, but at The Yard in Cardiff city centre and at The Halfway, it is 20p cheaper than Guinness – £2.95 and £3.15 a pint respectively – which could sway drinkers. This is a policy Brains’s sales and marketing director Richard Davies admitted was a deliberate ploy.

The two certainly look the same, but Brains does have a fuller, more distinctive malty flavour and a biting aftertaste. In the Cardiff Evening News taste tests at the two pubs, punters could just about distinguish the two.

Mr Davies said: “Guinness makes up about 96 per cent of the stout market – with Murphy’s and Beamish the other two main competitors.

“Unlike the other two, which are a bit sweeter, we have matched the Guinness flavour and results in our blind tests have showed that people have failed to tell the difference.

“Our main aims are to be cheaper than Guinness, to be more profitable for publicans and because it is from Brains it should sell well as a Welsh product.”

About five million pints of Guinness have been sold every St Patrick’s Day in the UK for the past 15 years and 12 million pints have been sunk worldwide – a large market for Brains Black to infiltrate.

Like Guinness in Ireland, Brains is synonymous as the producer of the Welsh national drink. New additions such as Brains Smooth and Brains SA Gold have proved very popular and have only added to the glowing reputation of the Cardiff brand.

Since Samuel Arthur Brain and his uncle Joseph Benjamin Brain went into partnership in 1882 to buy a three-storey stone brewery on St Mary Street, Brains beer has never looked back.

It quickly expanded by purchasing the Watson’s Cambrian Brewery, Womanby Street, in 1885. Then, two years later, it bought the land alongside the initial site to expand significantly.

Red Dragon, or Brains Dark as it was known in Cardiff, was the rock the company was built on and the reason why they adopted a red dragon as their logo.

Brains has become the major sponsor of Welsh sport, with the name donning the shirts of both the national rugby and football teams – apart from in France where alcohol advertising legislation requires the name to be changed to “Brawn.”

Mr Davies certainly has high hopes for the pint on St Patrick’s Day: “It is another priority of our PR and marketing team, and it is another opportunity for us to do something about pushing the drink.

“Tomorrow there will be 20 or so places stocking it with the majority in the Cardiff area, and the hope over the next 12 months is to get it into 100.”

Brains Brewery

Brains have certainly created a stout worthy of competition with Guinness, and savings of multiple 20p coins tomorrow night may persuade drinkers in some Cardiff pubs to switch for the night. But only when people wake up on Thursday morning and nurse their heads will we know whether Brains Black has managed to sit alongside a pint of the black stuff.

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