Here's a fun quote from Oliver Gogerty.  It comes from "As I Went Down Sacville Street."  Gogerty's flying over the city in his airplane, ruminating on the different landmarks in the city.  This is what he has to say about Guinness and drink.  Ireland is not called the land of extremes when it comes to alcohol for no reason: it is a culture split by the harsh demonization of drink and praise of drink as providing everything that makes Ireland great.  Enjoy.

...there is the great brewery that has done more for Dublin than any of its institutions. It cleared the  Liberties long before philanthropists took to improving the houses of the poor. It provided one of the loveliest yolks garten in Europe, and it set the model to employers long before Henry Ford expounded his theory of high wages. It went beyond that, for what happens in the U.S.A. to employees after the wage-earning age?--too old at forty: in Guinness's you are in your prime. If I were beginning life again--(oh! a pretty bad bump from the smoke of the chimneys to remind me that I must hold on to the life I have, such as it is)--if I were beginning life again I would seek a job in the brewery. I have often longed not only to take, but to make drink. And by making Guinness you make so many other things as well--garden villages, dependable workers and the "brew that savours of content." Like dark sleep, it knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, and, what is an achievement, it wastes the time that might, if we were not drinking, be devoted to scheming, posing, hypocrisy and moneymaking.

"The silted Nile mouths and the Moeritic Lake": Clouds. What a wonderful communion Guinness provides! You can drink yourself into helping the poor by better housing; you can drink yourself into St. Stephen's Green, or at least into appreciation of those who gave it to the city; and you can, if you like, drink yourself into poverty and become an object, when not a dispenser, of charity. Old martyrs fought with beasts in the arena and those tore out their victim's viscera in a minute; now you can dedicate your liver, fair and softly as they did whose custom provided the sums that went to the restoration of Christ Church, to the erection or maintenance of holy fanes. When you see a face that would act as a bed-warmer, as Will Shakespeare has it,

scorn it not. Salute the bon nez to which went so much drink in the making. And think of the Rose window of some great cathedral, gules and purple, wing on wing. Drink to the Lord Ardilaun who gave us the Green. Drink until you see the ducks swimming in your tankard. Drink your liver into martyrdom.., take your time: there are no Neros here. Where is my funnel? (pages 57-58)