S6E5: “Only Guinness Can Do”: How a Living Archives Powers Brand Authenticity

Transcript:

Erin Narloch  0:11  

On today’s History Factory podcast, we have a special guest, someone I’m really excited that we had the opportunity to chat with. We have Eibhlin Colgan, the manager of the Guinness archives, with us today.

 

Erin Narloch  0:25  

We have an incredible conversation spanning from how she got into Guinness’s archives, the evolution of her role, and what’s the value of brand heritage? How does a brand like Guinness that’s, you know, local and specific to Ireland and Dublin, but really has this global footprint, how does it collect and preserve and present that story? We talk about what’s needed in the 21st century for archives, including the thoughts on preservation of born digital materials. We even have a lightning round of questions that I think are really fun. I hope you enjoy today’s conversation as much as I did. Let’s get into it. Eibhlin, thank you so much for being with us today. Could you just give us a little introduction?

 

Eibhlin Colgan  1:34  

Yeah, delighted to. Thank you so much for the invite. So, my name is Eibhlin Colgan, and I manage the Guinness archives. I am based at the St James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin, Ireland, and I have been in role now for the last 25 years, which is quite incredible. So, my world, all day, every day at work, is curating and managing our amazing Guinness heritage.

 

Erin Narloch  2:00  

That’s incredible. Thank you for joining us today. Kicking it off, can we start: how did you make your way to Guinness? What was your journey to being, you know, the archivist?

 

Eibhlin Colgan  2:13  

Yeah, yeah. So, interesting, I would have had a background in history, which so many of us archivists do, I guess, and I was looking for a profession, I suppose, to be honest. What do I do when I finish college that can play to my interests, that can play to my interest in history? And I knew I didn’t want to go teaching, so when I was doing my master’s in history, I was looking for access to original papers, family history papers, of a big old landed estate in Kerry, where I’m from, in Ireland. And I was told that, actually, they were in the local library, but because they didn’t have an archivist, they were completely inaccessible and sitting on dusty shelves, and nobody could look for them, look at them. And I suppose that was kind of my light bulb moment, really, to say, ‘actually, that’s what I can do. I can, you know, I can pursue and see if there’s a career in looking after archival material, looking after records, the preservation, the access, everything that goes with that.’ So, I moved up to Dublin and did an archives course. There’s just one professional archives course that’s offered in Ireland, so pretty much all graduates in Ireland have gone through the course in University College Dublin, and as part of that, we were encouraged to do a work placement. And I was lucky enough to actually do my work placement at the Guinness archive, which, at the time, existed in our brewery in London. So, looking back now, Erin, it was just the most amazing experience. I got to live on-site in the brewery, on the brewery premises—which has since been knocked down, actually—and live in the houses that the head brewers would have lived in in the 1930s and 1940s, you know, as a very green-eyed Irish college student. So, an amazing experience. And I was just fortunate enough then that a role was established in Dublin. And I never did an interview in my life, not sure if I should publicly broadcast that, but based on the work experience, I moved into that role in Guinness, and pretty much never left. So, our archive—I would have joined the brewery in 2000, and our archive was only established about two years prior to that, so I’m just the second archivist to have worked and managed the collections.

 

Erin Narloch  4:44  

Wow, that’s incredible. And in the last 25 years, the archive has grown and has really kind of become a dynamic resource. Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of your role and the role of the archives?

 

Eibhlin Colgan  5:00  

Yeah, absolutely. Because, most definitely, the job description I signed up to all those 25 years ago is radically different from what it is today. I guess kind of 25 years ago, it would have been much more of a traditional archivist role in terms of taking over, first of all, a massive collection, actually, which was pretty much largely unprocessed at that stage. Our brewery site in Dublin stretches over 50 acres, and because the archive had only been established about two years before I joined, the first couple of years was literally physically trying to amass the collections into one place, do huge amount of appraisals. So, there was the more traditional archive work, I suppose. And then as the years went on, kind of four, five, six years in, absolutely we would have had queries the whole way through, but as we became more familiar with the collections, actually, the huge value to the company of the collection became more and more apparent. So, today, we would work right across—as many business archivists do—work across global marketing teams, local marketing teams, corporate relations…intellectual property and legal are good friends of ours. So, yeah, across a huge range of different departments. We would work with our colleagues in supply—so, the teams who actually make the beer—having a look back at some of our older recipes that we hold in the archive of what brewers would have brewed in the past. So, it’s really now a really broad gambit, and actually the archive is really well embedded into the brand and into how the company works. So, I would get involved at briefing stage for lots of different projects that happen, either be it new beers or new innovations or new marketing strategies. And the fact that the archive is there is really valued by the company. And I would say that it’s very much a future-facing role as well, that it’s absolutely not about looking back or protecting this heritage because it’s the right thing to do. It absolutely is the right thing to do, but there is a huge commercial benefit to the business from having this source of truth, especially in the world that we live in now. I think this point of authenticity, but actually just the inspiration that our teams all over the world gain from looking at what we’ve done before is just phenomenal. We have a phrase within Guinness that “only Guinness can do,” and that, I mean the archive typifies that because we record our history. It doesn’t belong to any other person, any other institution. It’s our brand history. So, “only Guinness can do” is very much part of the archive.

 

Erin Narloch  8:00  

That’s incredible. Again, truly speaking to the value of an embedded archive in, you know, a global company, and what it can do across all departments and functions, that’s really exciting. So, thinking to your time earlier on, did you come across an artifact or a document that really stopped you, and you were, like, ‘oh, wow.” Like, ‘I am a steward of a story much larger than myself that maybe has, you know, just great significance for Guinness and perhaps even broader.’ Do you have any of those documents?

 

Eibhlin Colgan  8:37  

Yeah, I think there’s probably a few examples. One of the earliest documents that probably would have stopped me in my tracks would have been related to our people. So, I always talk about Guinness and the brand, it’s very much a brand based on community, and certainly the growth of the brand globally over the last 250 years wouldn’t have taken place without the people who worked on the brand. And I remember uncovering, or opening up, a box of photographs—again, this is years ago—and we would have had a Roll of Honor of the men who would have left the brewery to go and fight in the first World War. So, I knew we had the Roll of Honor, but uncovering a photo album one day of these men in uniform, so many of them, you know, young, very young men, or older boys, even teenagers. And it was just, you know, looking at something that probably hadn’t been looked at in, you know, 50, 60, years. And it just brings, you know, brings the humanity in it, doesn’t it? It brings the personalities to life that you’re putting a face to these people that exist in a list of names, but actually looking at their faces and, yeah, breathing life back into them. So, that definitely would have been one of the earliest documents, earliest photo albums, that have stopped me in my tracks. 

 

Erin Narloch  10:04  

Great. Thanks for sharing that. I was just wondering, you spoke earlier about how you’re plugged into different parts of the business, you know, from briefing on products or projects or campaigns. How do you quantify the return on investment for heritage at Guinness? 

 

Eibhlin Colgan  10:25  

Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point, and to be perfectly honest, I haven’t cracked the matrix for that as of yet. And I guess so much of what we do, it’s the intangible benefits. So, I can, you know, we can put a commercial price on all the amazing merchandise ranges that are created as a result of using archival materials. That’s one thing. But, for example, one of the more recent projects that we’ve been involved in—going back a couple of years, but just recently opened—we’ve opened Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Covent Garden, right in the heart of London. It opened just in December 2025, and that was a project that myself and the team have been working on for the last pretty much four, five, six years. And I suppose what we bring in terms of the archive is, yes, there’s a generic Guinness history story—we have our founding and we have when we first brewed and everything like that—but how do we make our history location-specific and of interest to the location where this Open Gate Brewery is, which is a brewery and a visitor center? So, all of the research that we would have done in terms of our own collections, our external collections, to build up the story of Guinness specifically in London, and how do we tell that story in a way that’s different to the story that we tell for Guinness in Dublin? Because it is a very different story. And ultimately, the success of that has been the opening of this visitor center that’s, again, rooted in authenticity. The stories that we tell are all based on either materials that we’ve researched from our own collections or from third-party collections, but we can stand over that research, and it just makes for an incredibly authentic experience. So, down the road, the value of that will absolutely be measured by footfall and by the revenue that’s earned, but also just the incredible brand reputation that we’re building up by opening a visitor center within the heart of London. What’s interesting about that location is that it actually is based, is located, in a space called Old Brewer’s Yard. So, there actually had been a brewery—nothing to do with Guinness—but a brewery in that location going back to the 1700s. So, it was really interesting to pull out that story and actually be very respectful of—that’s not a Guinness story, but respectful of the heritage, and how can we tell that story? So, arguably, without our own in-house archive, you know, and the professionalism that comes with knowing what story to tell, knowing what formats to tell that story, we wouldn’t have been able, as a brand, to deliver the really unique, authentic, and just fun experience that is the London experience.

 

Erin Narloch  13:24  

That’s incredible. Thank you. Building upon that, I think Guinness is such an interesting brand, right? Because it has an identity local, maybe, to Dublin and Ireland, but it’s really across the world. Are there any, you know, requests you’ve received, or queries, that can really show that global footprint it has, or maybe the unique relationship it might have in different parts of the world that maybe an average drinker might not be aware of?

 

Eibhlin Colgan  13:56  

Yes, absolutely. So, in December, we had a number of celebrations. So, we had the launch of our Guinness Open Gate Brewery, we had our 25 years of the Guinness Storehouse, which is our visitor center based in Dublin, and then we also had 75 years of the Guinness Nigeria. So, people in the more western world, I suppose, in Europe and North America, would be really familiar with Guinness as a draft product served in a pint glass with a lovely surge and settle and a lovely creamy head on the top of it. But actually, there’s a whole other 50% of the Guinness world, which is the Guinness that’s mainly drunk in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, which is called Guinness Foreign Extra Stout. It’s a carbonated beer, so it doesn’t have the smoothness of draft Guinness. And we’ve actually been brewing that overseas since the early 1960s in Nigeria. So, I think it is very much—absolutely, this brand that was born out of Dublin and the Dublin heritage, and that sense of location, and that sense of where it was founded is hugely important. And equally, we still brew, very much brew, in St James’s Gate. But it is also this global story that takes on local nuances. So, in Africa, for example, in Nigeria—as of yet, I haven’t had the opportunity to travel there through work, but the teams would always say—in Nigeria, actually, Nigerians recognize Guinness as their product. They really don’t believe it came from Ireland at all. So, it’s this global brand, but very much taking on kind of local attributes, and local communities really taking it on. And that informs different rituals, different drinking traditions. So, in the Caribbean, it would be quite common to have a Guinness punch, which is Guinness with condensed milk and spices. So, completely different to how we might consume Guinness in Europe or North America. So, all of that history. So, we are absolutely based in Dublin in terms of being the Guinness archive, but we are the global archive for the company, so our remit is to make sure that in as much as we’re collecting materials relating to Guinness in Europe and North America, that we’re also really representing this really rich tapestry, actually, of how Guinness shows up around the world.

 

Erin Narloch  16:36  

Yeah, wow. That’s exciting, and a challenge—to think about a global footprint, and how do you represent those populations, that area, with within the archive? I have a question for you. As you think of, like, born digital materials—like, in the last, you know, I would say, in the last 25 years—what’s being produced has changed as far as it comes to, like, archive collecting. How are you taking on this born digital era of materials?

 

Eibhlin Colgan  17:10  

Yeah, so I would say that for the first 25-odd years of the archive—for the first 20, maybe, odd years of the archive—we were very much focused on our analog collections, so our physical collections. And it’s really only in the last, kind of, five or six years that we’ve turned to tackle the beast, I suppose, that are digital collections. So, I had been squirreling away a folder of born digital material from probably the early 2000s. So, we actually have a really substantial collection of born digital material, but we’ve only just recently taken on some project catalogers to start working through those collections, and they’re absolutely, absolutely invaluable. We also onboarded a digital preservation system a couple of years ago, so that’s very much an ongoing project to ingest our material into our digital preservation system, but hugely important to us. We have, absolutely, that eye to the future. We have a huge digitization program of our analog collections, of our hard copy collections, but as we all know, when we work in heritage space, digitization isn’t enough. We need to make sure that we’re preserving that material into the future as well. So, we would take in born digital material from colleagues and from agencies all around the world, and we ingest that into into our digital preservation system, so that we make sure that in as much as we can read hard copy paper from 100 years ago, or our lease, which is written on vellum, from 257 years ago, that we can read Word documents in the next five years, the next 10 years. I mean, the the rate of technological changes, as we all know, is just so huge. So, I would say that we have put a huge focus in the last two or three years. One of my team, for example, is a digital archivist in her title, and that’s a relatively new position for us within the last couple of years. And it’s to make sure that—I think with, you know, with any of us who are brand guardians and act in that role, the wish is to make sure that we’re handing on the collections in better care and a better state than when we inherited them. And absolutely, it’s not enough just to make sure that our hard copy files are neatly preserved away, but absolutely so important to have that eye to the future for our digital material as well, making sure that we can use, access, and actually maintain the integrity of it as a record. So, it’s hugely important as well. 

 

Erin Narloch  19:59  

Yeah. And I think you’re correct in saying it’s that big, black box, like, tackling that and figuring out what system works best for an organization for access and use. You know, preservation, access and use, as you mentioned. So, looking to the future, like, for the next generation of heritage leaders, corporate archivists, stewards of brands, what do you think the most important trait is for them, that will be required of them, as they lead these centers of excellence into the future?

 

Eibhlin Colgan  20:37  

Yeah, I think the skills that we develop, I suppose, as corporate archivists, and certainly as brand archivists, are very radically different from the skills I would have learned as a traditional archivist back in college however many years ago. Communications as a key skill just being so hugely important. Advocating for your collections being so important as well. And certainly, like, our brand teams would use the archive very proactively to hold attention, actually, in how the brand represents itself, both now and into the future, by saying we are a brand that has been around—in our case, in Guinness’ case, for 257 years now, we were founded in 1759—and there are certain core truths that are part of the brand’s DNA that have existed throughout that time. And one of the ways that the archive is used by, especially, our marketing teams, is to keep them honest and to keep them true. And that’s definitely not something that you learn in college, certainly not in Ireland’s archive college system. So, it’s that communication, I suppose. And it’s also knowing your business. It’s being able to speak the language of the business is so important, and that goes back to the communications piece as well. Like, I can only insert the archive into the business processes if I know what those processes are. And obviously they’re going to change from organization to organization, but that absolutely has been key for me, and key for how the archive has grown within the business over those past two decades. So, we would have started off as very much a traditional repository, as a reactive department, to be honest. People would have come to us for queries. And that’s really now changed on its head, with the archive being part of, say, briefings for new marketing campaigns,  being very much at the center of a lot of work that the brand does. And it’s, you know, we only got to that place, I suppose, over the last two decades by speaking that language of the business, by really integrating ourselves into the company, and by virtue of that, being able to show the true value of the archive. And then it becomes a, you know, becomes a perpetual wheel that just keeps building and building. And, again, it’s not—we’ve a lovely phrase within Guinness that we’re ‘future makers since 1759,’ so it’s absolutely not about using our past to look back. It’s like, what are those threads from our past that really support how and where the brand is today? So, we, as a brand, we’ve always stood for quality. We’ve an incredible—our first ad, from almost 100 years ago, talks about quality in the copy. We’ve an incredible track record for innovation, which gives great basis for the innovations that we do today. So, yeah, communication, in its broadest sense, would absolutely be one of the most important skills, I think, as a brand archivist. It’s knowing your collections, but then it’s also knowing the elements of the collections that are really going to resonate with the brand teams, with the corporate teams and, ultimately, with consumers. Because we’re all consumers at the end of the day, 

 

Erin Narloch  24:21  

Yeah, and thank you for that. I really appreciate that, that idea of knowing the language of your business and understanding the business you’re in. Reflecting the language you hear from your colleagues I thought was, when I was building corporate archives, just a really important skill to have, to be curious, to ask how the archive can support, really, right? To go from that kind of reactive state to proactive thought partner, collaborator, for the archive.

 

Eibhlin Colgan  24:51  

Absolutely. And that’s exactly where the richness is as well, because if we were to remain as that reactive service, where colleagues are coming to us to look for, you know, a photo or a fact point of truth, it’s like, come to us and give us the context for why you’re looking for that photo or that point of truth, and actually, there might be 10 much better examples within the collection. So, you know, using the professionalism, I suppose, of the archivists. As brand archivists, we all know our collections inside out, and it’s using, you know—provide us with the context, and the output will be so much richer.

 

Erin Narloch  25:34  

Oh, for sure. And that’s a truly, I believe, a creative act, that when you come to an archivist, a brand archivist, who really understands the history and the context of the brand, and you give the situation, then the conversation you have, you can, you know, I think of it as a web. You can go and explore all different tangents around, maybe, a theme or a date or a milestone. There’s so much more to uncover. So, I have a few questions, kind of in a lightning round, to ask you. They should be fun. I’m going to start with the greatest myth. So, what is the most common misconception about Guinness’s story that you find yourself constantly correcting?

 

Eibhlin Colgan  26:25  

So, that’s good. There’s probably a few myths, actually. One is that we use Liffey water directly from the Liffey that runs through Dublin City Center. Very happy to dispel that myth. We don’t. We take water from the Wicklow Mountains. And there’s another myth that Arthur Guinness, our founder, was brewing one day, and his grains went up in smoke. There was an accident in the brewery, and his grains went on fire. And being a canny Irish man, instead of throwing out and disposing in the rubbish of his burnt grains, he decided to use them in his brew, and that’s where stout, or porter, was born. So, happy to dispel that one as well.

 

Erin Narloch  27:10  

Okay, so what about kind of a time traveler test? So, what if Arthur Guinness walked into St James’s Gate today? What is one modern innovation he would be really proud of?

 

Eibhlin Colgan  27:24  

I think how Guinness shows up today as a drink is quite different to Arthur’s time. So, the innovation that happened about 60 years ago in terms of our liquid was the introduction of nitrogen into our beer, and it’s nitrogen that gives that tight, creamy head on the top of a pint of Guinness that, again, we would be really familiar with in North America and in Europe. So, I think he would be amazed to find that the flavor is quite similar to the brew he would have brewed 200-odd years ago, but actually, the look and the mouthfeel and the texture is really, really different. So, I still do think he’d recognize it as his origin recipe, but very much having been evolved. Yeah.

 

Erin Narloch  28:11  

Okay, so this next question, I think there are, like, two ways to ask it. I could ask you, like, what’s your favorite material in the archive? Or if, you know, if the archive was disappearing, what are the things you would need to keep? So, I leave it up to you, the way you want to answer that.

 

Eibhlin Colgan  28:31  

Oh, that’s so hard, isn’t it? It’s always like a ‘what’s your favorite child’ type of question. I think it depends. It depends a little bit on kind of the projects I’m working on at the moment, or the mood. I’d probably pick out two parts of the collection. Well, one, in terms of a document, it would have to be the original lease that Arthur Guinness signed on our brewery in 1759. Sounds very obvious, maybe, but it is our founding document. I genuinely get goosebumps every time I look at it, because if I have it out and I’m looking at it, I would be standing in the exact same position that Arthur was standing when he signed it, with his feather and quill, back in 1759. So, just that incredible, tangible piece of history is just incredible. And needless to say, there’s only one copy of it, so that absolutely would be. And then, kind of turning to advertising, I suppose, Guinness as a brand is hugely visual, especially throughout the 20th century, and our collections really reflect that. And we have an incredible archive collection of original artworks that were done by an artist called John Gilroy, who would have created the Guinness toucan, which you can see in every Irish pub, I think, all around the world. And part of our collections is we hold his original sketches, so everything from, like, back of a bus stop pencil sketches, right up through to full crayon drawings, which would have been ultimately used to create the adverts. So, there’s something really special and really unique about those as well.

 

Erin Narloch  30:20

Oh, that’s incredible. Yeah, I love advertising history, and I love all of the sketches that go into kind of making the finished work in exactly one word. What is the primary responsibility of a corporate guardian?

 

Eibhlin Colgan   30:37

Ooh, that is a great question. I nearly actually would. Nearly actually would use the word guardianship, to be honest, and I know that was the answer was in the question um but I think that sums up. It’s it’s maybe… It’s using the history and protecting the history. But it’s also the sense of guardianship is something that’s kind of progressive, that moves and it’s something that to be passed on. And I say, I really do feel that sense of, I would love … I want the collections to be in a much better place when I, when I, when I pass them on to the next, the next archivist, than when I received them in. So that piece around kind of ever evolving and ever living, I think, is summed up quite well, great.

 

Erin Narloch  31:24

And then final question, but are there any other corporate archives you look to that really inspire how they’re utilizing their history and storytelling?

 

Eibhlin Colgan   31:35

Yeah, it’s interesting. I think, within an Irish context, there’s very, very few corporate archivists. And there really is. It’s quite a new quite a new enough field. Even though we’ve been established as the Guinness Archives for well over 25 years, it’s still relatively new in Ireland. So I would look overseas to two other corporate archivists. And I do, I do my best to try and attend the International Council on Archives Section on Business Archives, a bit of a mouthful, but the ICA SBA every year, because that’s an incredible collection of corporate archivists, amongst whom there’s a lot of brand archivists and from around the world. And so I guess kind of in particular, I would look to some of the other big global brands that have this kind of local, global story, like we would do. So the likes of, I guess, Coca Cola, when you look at their advertising, the likes of the Ford archive, I would look to those as well. I think what Levi’s do, what Tracy does, and Levi’s and run social, his social and storytelling is incredible. And so they tend, tend to be more U.S.-based actually, would be the peers that we would look to.

 

Erin Narloch  32:49

Yeah, that’s great. It was a great session this last year at ICA SBA. And, you know, next year or this year, in 2026 it’ll, it’ll be in Europe. So a little 

 

Eibhlin Colgan  32:59 

Yeah, please come to Brussels. Yeah, come to Brussels. 

 

Erin Narloch  33:01 

Yeah, come to Brussels. Well, great, Eibhlin, thank you so much for your time today. It was really an incredible conversation. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and so much more about the Guinness archives. I feel like I’ve learned something, and I hope our listeners have too.

 

Eibhlin Colgan  33:18 

Thank you so much for having me on.

 

Erin Narloch  33:24

What a fun, informative conversation with Eibhlin. A big thank you for spending the time with us on The History Factory Podcast today and sharing so many insights. Some things that really stuck out to me was the kind of the future of archivists and the need for communication and advocacy and speaking the language of your business. I also thoroughly enjoyed hearing about Eibhiln’s own career trajectory, how she got to Guinness, and how that the role she has today, has evolved over time. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation as much as I did, and I think it would only be proper for us to take a moment, grab a pint, and say, “sláinte!” and until next time, thanks for listening.