Colm O’Connor, Guinness Brewery Ambassador, Provides Details on Alive In 25 – Guinness Storehouse 25th Anniversary

Guinness, the nearly 266-year-old brewery, celebrates St. Patrick’s Day Weekend in the midst of the 25th anniversary of the world-renowned Guinness Storehouse located in Dublin, Ireland. To gain a greater knowledge of this milestone for the iconic brewery, we chatted with Colm O’Connor, Guinness Brewery Ambassador, this past week.

With the brewery’s history dating back to 1759, Guinness has been a beer that has stood the test of time. It has also attracted a diverse fan base of beer drinkers from around the globe. Guinness’ frothy head with its bold, roasty characteristics at a sessionable alcohol content is just a few reasons that this beer is so popular no matter the occasion. 

This popularity has led many of its fans to the homeland of Guinness and visit the brewery in Dublin. To enhance its visitor’s experience, Guinness officially opened its Guinness Storehouse, a massive seven floor building, on November 27, 2000. This new experience allowed visitors to discover what goes into making each pint Guinness, learn about the incredible brand history stretching over 265 years, its iconic advertising, as well as a Guinness tasting like no other. 

The Guinness Storehouse has proved to be so popular that it became Ireland’s number one tourist attraction in its first year of operation. That year it welcomed 570,000 visitors. Just this past year, the Guinness Storehouse welcomed 1.65 million visitors in 2024 serving over 1.5 million pints of Guinness and Guinness 0.0.

One of Guinness Storehouse’s largest attraction is its Gravity Bar that allows visitors panoramic 360⁰ views of Dublin city. To ease the congestion that this one of kind bar attracted, Guinness built and opened a second Gravity Bar in early 2020. Then a few years later in 2023, The Guinness Storehouse was voted the World’s Leading Visitor Attraction 2023 at the World Travel Awards. So yes, it has been a true success!

For the 25th Anniversary of the Guinness Storehouse, the brewery is hosting the evolving Alive In 25 programming that will bring a year of events to Ireland’s most popular tourist attraction. 

To learn more about this activation, we spoke to Colm O’Connor, Guinness Brewery Ambassador, on what visitors should expect this year when visiting the Guinness Storehouse over the coming year. The nearly ten-year employee of Guinness has made an impression at the brewery and has worked his way up through the ranks to become an integral part of the Storehouse.

Colin leads VIP visitors on exclusive, Access All Areas tours of the St. James’s Gate Brewery site. These tours showcase the brewery’s 266 years of brewing heritage, highlighting philanthropy, innovation, quality, advertising, and the delightful experience of tasting Guinness!

“The main news is our Alive In 2025 event,” said Colm. “It’ll be punctuated by different events throughout the year. There’s going to be initiatives under banners like music and sports and art, so it’s kind of like multidisciplinary. But we’re kind of keeping it under wraps at the minute, so it’s basically just to urge people to keep your finger on the pulse and have a have a look”

“I have worked for 10 of those 25 years there. So it’s near like an anniversary for me as well and we our number one tourist attraction now. I’m not just saying that the figures will bear me out. We actually had 1.65 million people that last year. It really peaks from St. Patrick’s week onwards. Once we get into the end of March and then into April, summer starts.”

Speaking of St. Patrick’s, this is a very busy week for Guinness. Of course there will be plenty of pints of Guinness Draught pouring across the globe but the epicenter will be in Dublin at the Guinness Storehouse. It hosts a five-day festival that would be an amazing experience to take in and be a part of!

“What we’re doing for the SPF as we call St. Patrick’s Festival, is a five-day festival at the Guinness Storehouse,” stated Colm. “We start on the Friday and its ongoing until Tuesday. So it’s the 14th to the 18th and we have special music events. Two of them kind of mainly based on local traditional Irish music. We also have an alternative supergroup called BIIRD playing that’s going to be a huge event.”

“And we also have storytelling as well. Storytelling is a big part of the Irish experience. It’s common in a lot of cultures, but we really have a strong oral tradition and that that remains the case. We have a story telling collective called Seanchoiche. They’re going to have spoken performances of storytelling; they’re going to have food and it’s very much under the theme of celebration!”

It has been nearly a decade since we visited Guinness and a bit has changed since then. The Guinness Storehouse continues to evolve to meet the desires of its guests.

“We’ve changed a great deal, since then,” said Colm. “We actually have two Gravity Bars, so when you when you were there, it was just one facing the city. We actually have another one. and that was opened in February 2020. So if you think back, that was unusual timing right before everything shutdown.”

Adding the second Gravity Bar ended up being a godsend as the world managed its way through COVID and the shutdowns it brought with it. As bars were able to reopen with social distancing, having a second bar allowed Guinness to serve its thirsty fans in a more what was considered safe environment for an indoor setting.

“The new gravity bar faces west, and that faces towards Phoenix Park,” said Colm. “You can also see the Dublin Mountains as well. So we get pretty good sunsets now. whereas we didn’t get before. We get a pretty sizeable sunset now coming into the spring and in the summertime on the on the western side.”

When we spoke with Colm late last week, he was visiting New York City for a few days. While in the Big Apple, he visited customers to spread the good word of Guinness and of course take in a few Irish pubs. A few highlights of the days were his visits to O’Hara’s, The Dead Rabbit, and Swift Hibernian Lounge. He was also excited about some sweet vinyl record finds to bring back home to Dublin with him.

But what does a guy that leads the most exclusive tours of the Guinness Storehouse look for in a bar? Not surprisingly, not much different than what many of us look for.

“My favorite type of pub would be one whereby there is minimum distraction,” said Colm. “So you basically have a nice congenial kind of atmosphere, whereby you can indulge in nice conversation, punctuated by sips of Guinness.”

Sounds perfect to us, and as the saying goes, “It’s a lovely day for a Guinness!”

Guinness Lovely Day Project

Guinness is inviting everyone (21+) to be a part of its new Lovely Day Project and submit their stories to pov.camera/guinness for a chance to be featured in a billboard and even its next television commercial.

Guinness has partnered with POV to help you quickly and easily snap and share your St. Patrick’s Day celebrations with us. Simply scan the QR code if you see it in the wild, or visit pov.camera/guinness to add your photos to the official Guinness St. Patrick’s Day camera roll. In addition to posting these moments to @GuinnessUS social handles, and even putting some on billboards, Guinness may feature your story in its new commercial later this year.

Don’t just hear about it, experience Alive in 25. Be the first to know about upcoming events and experiences at the Guinness Storehouse in 2025. Follow @homeofguinness #Alivein25 and visit www.guinness-storehouse.com.