BEAMISH STOUT Upon returning to Dublin ten years after my initial visit, I couldn't help but notice that nostalgia had rendered the Guinness slightly less tasty than I remembered. After visiting Guinness' brand-new storehouse museum, my american father-in-law asked, "are there other beers in Ireland similar to Guinness?" I explained that, aside from a few microbrews, Murphy's and Beamish were the closest he'd get to Guinness. I explained that personally, I found Murphy's to be a bit too sweet, but that Beamish wasn't readily available in San Francisco, maybe we should try it together? He took one sip and said, "Hm. That tastes more like Guinness than that last pint of Guinness did." It was the next day I read in the paper that Dubliners had been the butt of a rather cruel joke for the past two years: the Guinness distributed in Dublin was being produced primarily in Nigeria. Viva la Beamish!