It’s midday on a Friday, and Oisin Rogers, co-founder of the Devonshire, is watching a familiar scene: a group of customers are standing outside his lauded Soho pub, Guinness foam round their mouths after their first gulps, holding their pint glasses up to eye level to determine which one of them has secured the bragging rights for most accurately “splitting the G.”
“I probably see it about 120 times a day,” Rogers says matter-of-factly about the viral drinking game taking over U.K. pubs. “They’ll be in for another round shortly.”
All those rounds are adding up. At the end of December, Guinness recorded double-digit growth for the eighth consecutive half, with a 17 per cent organic net sales uplift, according to Grainne Wafer, global director at owner Diageo Plc. Such was the unprecedented demand during the festive season that the U.K. ran into supply shortages. Guinness is building a second 200-million pound ($217 million U.S.) brewery in County Kildare, Ireland, set to start production by 2026, to help keep pace with the seemingly unquenchable thirst for its product.
“If Wetherspoon’s had said we’re going to encourage people to split the G, we’d lose our licence for encouraging binge drinking,” says Tim Martin, founder and chairman of J D Wetherspoon PLC, which runs 800 pubs in the U.K. and Ireland. “But there’s no more powerful thing than a fashion idea, and, yes, the moment for Guinness has come.”
Sales of the stout at the pub chain are up 85 per cent from their pre-pandemic level, which amounts to about 25 million pints a year.
If you haven’t been in a British pub lately or aren’t a regular social media scroller, the aim of the game is, in your first uninterrupted gulps, to accurately bring the level of black liquid underneath the foamy head to a specific point on an official Guinness-branded pint glass. There’s some debate as to whether the level of your drink should split the middle of the letter G — that is, aligning with the horizontal stroke, or crossbar — or if it should split the gap between the top of the G and the bottom of Guinness’s harp logo. The preferred version of the rules depends on which passionate faction you speak to, and there’s even an app that launched last year to ensure the game continues when branded pint glasses aren’t in sight.
One of the earliest major nods to Split the G online was Urban Dictionary’s explanation of the game in 2018, when it was first getting some local recognition in pubs. It took off in earnest on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and X in 2022, with searches for it spiking in December of that year, as shown via Google trends. In that same period, the Devonshire, Guinness’ largest single account in the world, sold 27,500 pints or just over 312 kegs of the black stuff during the week leading up to Christmas Eve, according to Rogers. (It usually gets through 170 kegs in quiet week and 280 kegs in a busy one.)
Guinness’ numbers have also been boosted by celebrities playing along. Ed Sheeran and Niall Horan jumped on the bandwagon last year, while Paul Mescal, Joe Jonas and John Cena have all preached G splitting in recent times.
“I wouldn’t call it a trend,” says Rogers of the current sales environment, in which Guinness is outselling lager by about 15 to 1. The fond rituals tied to pulling the perfect pint, plus games like Split the G, have been able to bring people together across many demographics in a way no other drink can, he continues. “It has transcended pubs and beer and become a cultural phenomenon. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it before.”
Diageo’s Wafer credits a significant part of this new golden age for the 267-year-old stout to the company’s conscious choice to embrace fragmented media consumption patterns and adopt a social-first model to marketing and engagement. “We’ve invested in digital tools that allow us to really understand the signals that are coming through social media and to then respond to them in real time,” Wafer says. “We can see the cultural kind of resonance and heat around the brand from our communities, who are being much more playful with the rituals around Guinness as a mark of quality,” she adds.
It’s that approach and the virtuous cycle of social media — plus the fact that Split the G’s most ardent fans are, unsurprisingly, younger drinkers — that has Wetherspoon’s Martin categorizing Guinness’s explosive growth as almost certainly a spike.
“A curious factor that you don’t see unless you’re in the pub world is that every few years, there’s an odd product which captures the imagination, mainly of young people, and becomes vast,” Martin explains. Over 30 years ago, he says, the No. 1 bottle product of any description in the U.K. was an eight-per-cent-alcohol rocket fuel called Diamond White, which just took off, before disappearing. “Then you had Budweiser, Smirnoff Ice, Magners Irish Cider, Vodka Red Bull, Jägerbombs, and then just before the pandemic you had gin, which came from nowhere, more than doubled in sales, eclipsed vodka, and now it’s disappeared again.”
So while he doesn’t believe Guinness is going anywhere, he finds it hard to believe there won’t be another trend that steals the imagination and the market with it.
“I often ask myself, why was I, a six-foot-six guy, wearing bell-bottom pants with platform shoes in the late 1970s?” says Martin. “Fashion, and fashion trends, are far more powerful factors in humanity than we like to believe, and I love Guinness, but I still think that it’s riding a wave.”
Bloomberg
