Guinness and Gen Z: a slow pint becomes a game, and the kegs run short

Guinness has spent decades making a virtue of slowness. The brand says a perfect pint of Guinness Draught takes 119.5 seconds to pour, in two stages, and its advertising told drinkers that good things come to those who wait. From around 2023 that ritual found a new audience. Young drinkers in Britain and Ireland, and women in particular according to analysts quoted at the time, began ordering Guinness in numbers, and social media filled with splitting the G: taking one long first sip and trying to stop the line between stout and foam exactly across the middle of the G on the glass.

By December 2024 demand in Great Britain had outrun what Diageo could ship. The company told some pubs it was setting allocation limits so supply would last through the Christmas season, saying it had seen exceptional demand and had maximised supply. In February 2025 Diageo said Guinness had become the best-selling beer in Great Britain, with one pint in ten sold in British pubs now a Guinness, and Guinness 0.0 distribution growing fast. In 2025 it also proposed doubling the capacity of its new brewery in County Kildare to make Guinness and Guinness 0.0. The story is still moving, and whether the demand holds beyond a generation’s fashion is not yet known.

A ritual the brand had already built

Our books say that only power brands manage to found a rite: a repeated action a community performs the same way every time, which turns buying into belonging. Most brands can join a ritual. Few can author one, because commanding a shared behaviour takes standing.

Guinness had that standing long before TikTok. The two-part pour, the wait at the bar, the settling cascade and the dark body under a white head were already a ceremony with fixed steps. What changed after 2023 was the meaning of the steps, as young drinkers turned the first sip into a small game with a visible score. Guinness asked drinkers to wait for their pint for decades, and a generation that grew up on instant everything decided the wait was the fun part.

Why adoption happened now

The MOA model (motivation, opportunity, ability) reads the timing. Motivation arrived through emulation and competition: friends filming each other’s attempts, a score anyone could see in the glass. Opportunity was the pub itself, where a pint that takes two minutes to arrive becomes part of the evening. Ability is where Guinness 0.0 matters: an alcohol-free version that looks the same in the glass let people take part in the ritual without drinking alcohol, which widened the door for a generation that drinks less on average.

None of the three conditions was invented by Diageo in 2023. The product, the pour and the logo on the glass were old. The company’s contribution was to keep all three intact for decades, and then to make the alcohol-free version good enough that the ritual could travel with it.

What a shortage tests

The allocation limits of late 2024 were reported as rationing, and for a moment a stout was scarce. Some brands would treat that as an opportunity to manage scarcity on purpose. Guinness is a different class of product. The value sits in the pint and the ritual around it, and a drinker who finds no Guinness at the bar simply orders something else. A habit that took two years to form can loosen in a few weekends.

The risk for Diageo was quality more than supply. A ritual this precise depends on thousands of pubs pouring correctly, glasses with the right logo and lines kept clean. Faster growth puts pressure on every one of those details, and the young drinkers who adopted the ritual are the same ones who film a bad pour and share it. New brewing capacity answers the supply problem, and the standard of the pour at the bar has to keep pace with it.

The broader lesson is about patience. Guinness kept a ritual consistent for long enough that a new generation could discover it on its own terms, without a new identity built to chase them. If you want your team to see which of your rituals could carry the next generation of customers, train your team to read them before you replace them.