Guinness drinkers know there's a certajn art to pouring a perfect pint whether it is in a pub or straight from a can.
Tilt the glass at the right angle and you get a pint that not only tastes good but looks good.
Like a correctly poured pint, Netflix's new period drama 'House of Guinness' definitely looks the part.
But as stout drinkers will tell you, there are stouts that may look the part but they certainly do not meet the taste test.
'House of Guinness' is an eight part drama from the fevered mind of 'Peaky Blinders' creator Steven Knight.
And certainly, it's the most 'Peaky Blinders' a TV show could be without actually being 'Peaky Blinders'.
Full of industrial grime, family scheming, swaggering males, comely maidens, wiser older ladies, savage acts of violence and brash rock music, like 'Peaky Blinders' it takes great liberties with history.
The show begins with the passing of the Dublin brewing magnate Benjamin Guinness in 1868 and the immediate impact on his four children.
Anthony Boyle's Arthur is the eldest - an Eton educated bon vivant who returns from London to run the brewery with his younger brother, Louis Partridge's Edward and who also has to hide his homosexuality.
Edward is the smartest sibling - passionate about the family business, strategic, wary of Arthur's showmanship but not averse to risk taking.
Emily Fairn is Ann Plunkett, the only daughter married to a minor aristocrat much older than her, she is left trying to find some purpose in life after inheriting nothing in her father's will.
Last and defintely least is Fionn O'Shea's Benjamin Guinness II, an alcoholic wastrel who scrapes by after incurring severe gambling debts in Dublin and who receives nothing in the will.
The Guinnesses are an Anglo Irish Establishment family supportive of the union with Britain at a time when nationalist sentiment is rising in Ireland.
Leading the nationalist charge is Niamh McCormack's savvy young lassie Ellen Cochrane whose twin brother, Seamus O'Hara's rebel Patrick is all brawn and no brains.
Ellen is hostile to the Guinness family and their pro-Union leanings but, like Edward, she is much more pragmatic and strategic than her brother.
Conscious of the influence of the Fenian movement in North America and the opportunities for the family business if he can reach an accommodation with them, Edward reaches out to Ellie because while the Guinesses are loyal to the Crown, they're more focussed on earning thousands of half crowns.
In addition to flirting politically and romantically with Ellen, Edward takes a punt on Jack Gleason's Byron Hedges, a relative of his sister in law and wife of Arthur, Danielle Galligan's Lady Olivia Hedges from Bantry in County Cork.
A silver tongued, twinkly eyed salesman, Byron promotes the Guinness brand in New York and North America with a view to helping it become the biggest brewery in the world and he courts the Irish American community by playing on their nationalist sympathies.
Lady Olivia, meanwhile, is a no nonsense gal who agrees to an open marriage that allows her to take a lover while her husband indulges a clandestine gay lifestyle.
That lover is that the brewery foreman and henchman, James Norton's Sean Rafferty who spends a lot of his time thumping Fenians.
Dervla Kirwan's Anna Guinness is the family matriarch and aunt of the siblings who keeps a close eye on Anne, their smart cousin Ann Skelly's Adelaide Guinness and Jessica Reynolds' sensitive young aristocrat Christine O'Madden who is in love with Benjamin but is vying for his attention with Elizabeth Dulau's Lady Henrietta St Lawrence.
Add into the mix Michael McElhatton's savvy Guinness family butler John Potter, David Wilmot's wily dockland underworld figure Bonnie Champion and Michael Colman's scheming clergyman uncle, the Reverend Henry Grattan and you've got a heady brew, right?
Actually, no.
'House of Guinness' is a smug, messy, overblown, overacted, poorly written show that is clearly enamoured with itself.
An Englishman's version of Irish history, it fuses 'Peaky Blinders' with 'Downton Abbey,' 'Bridgerton,' 'Moulin Rouge' and 'Succession' with working class, fighting Irish characters who look like and act like the Notre Dame logo or something out of a Punch cartoon.
Lauded by critics in the US and the UK, it wraps itself up in a Celtic cloak but is made purely for an international audience with its stereotypical hard partying, twinkly eyed, fighting, fornicating Irish characters.
And while it is handsomely shot by Nicolai Bruel and Joe Saade with terrific production design by Richard Bullock and costumes by Edward K Gibbon, all of that counts very little when its eight scripts are as woeful as this.
So while directors Tom Shankland and Mounia Ali throw in all the slick visuals and sexy Irish rock and folk music they can get their hands on from the likes of Fontaines DC, Kneecap, Lankum, the Murder Capital, The Stunning, The Mary Wallopers and The Chieftains, it a means very little thanks to Knight's ridiculously overblown Baz Luhrman style writing.
His characters are not believable.
The liberties taken with history are just slapdash.
The punk aesthetic in 19th Century clobber rings false.
And it confirms once again that Knight is possibly the most overrated screenwriter working in TV and cinema today, producing scripts full of style and swagger but very little substance.
As a result, the cast struggles, resorting to pantomime performances.
The worst offenders are undoubtedly Gleason who seems to have based his performance of the family fixer on the Kellogg's Lucky Charms leprechaun and Norton who seems so worried about getting his Dublin accent right, his depiction of a Guinness hardman is reminiscent of the line that Jimmy Kimmel once used about Matt Damon in his Oscar send up of 'We Bought a Zoo,' it's just so "effortful".
The women are poorly served too in Knights' scripts, being mostly cast as lovelorn characters chased by randy men and succumbing to their dubious charms or they are scheming, always scheming while ever holding the reins of power.
'House of Guinness' is faux Hibernophilia that understandably critics in Ireland have slated.
And like the work of Baz Luhrman post 'Strictly Ballroom,' it's overblown, irritating guff that becomes a real slog to wade through.
The tragedy is not that it was made at all because in the right hands it might have worked.
It's that we will have to endure more series of a drama that may look like a perfectly poured pint but actually tastes of tar and old socks.
('House of Guinness' was made available for streaming worldwide on Netflix on September 25, 2025)
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