Tag Archive for: gravediggers

The Best 5 Pints of Guinness in Dublin City

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Let me start this post by assuring you that DublinByPub has not decided to pivot toward a clickbait, listicle-heavy style of content. Nor are we looking to join the small country sized amount of Guinness review pages out there. But being a website, Instagram account, twitter account, with something of a following, we’re often queried on where we believe the best pints in Dublin can be found. So hence: this post.  

Before we go any further, please let us say that we believe the finest pint for sale within the known and ever-expanding ninety-three billion lightyear-wide cosmos which we inhabit is that which pours in Kavanagh’s pub in Glasnevin (original post here). Our position on this remains unchanged. 

But for this post, we want to concern ourselves exclusively with pubs in Dublin city centre – i.e. between the canals.

I also want to say that taste is subjective. Some people eat liver with mushrooms and listen to Garth Brooks, and it’s not my or your place to pass judgement on such freaks of nature. If you don’t agree with our list, that’s ok – you can go and make your own list and post it up on the internet yourself, too.  

Anyhow, here we go – in no particular order (after the first one) here are our five best Dublin City Centre Pints.  

J.M Cleary’s: Amiens Street

A favoured haunt of Michael Collins, Cleary’s is said to have had its electricity bill taken care of by Irish Rail to balance the inconvenience of having had a railway bridge pass over its roof. Evidently, the time that would have been spent on the administrative task of paying the electric has been better spent perfecting their pint purveying abilities- they’re unrivalled between the canals, as far as we’re concerned.

(Price: €5.20 as of Summer 2022) 

Click Here for our original post on Cleary’s

Cleary

The Lord Edward: Christchurch Place

We adore and have always adored The Lord Ed. And while this has been the favourite pub in the world as far as yours truly is concerned, I had always only considered the pint to be adequate – not poor, but not even threatening for the top ten. But then something changed. Upon returning after lockdown, the quality of the pint was found to have improved exponentially. And a year or so later that level of quality remains the same.

(Price: €5.50 as of Summer 2022) 

Click Here for our original post on The Lord Edward

Lord Ed

Toner’s: Baggot Street

Famed as the only pub that WB Yeats set ever set foot in, Toner’s is sat on the well-trodden drinking trail referred to by some as The Baggot Mile. William Butler was good at the poems, but not great at the pints – so consider the likes of Ronnie Drew, Peter O’Toole and Patrick Kavanagh’s former patronage of the place as a more qualified endorsement of it. That said, it would have to lose a point or two on grounds of price, but it always feels worth the money when you’re sat in that famous snug.

(Price: €6 as of Spring 2022) 

Click Here for our original post on Toner’s

toner_col

Fallon’s: The Coombe

Sitting at the very start of the district which houses the Guinness brewery – The Liberties, Fallon’s is as fine an ambassador as you could hope for, for both the area and the brewery. One of the great historic Dublin pubs, it’s always dishing out consistently decent stout.

(Price €5.50 as of Summer 2022)

Click Here for our original post on Fallon’s

fallons2

The Piper’s Corner: Marlborough Street

We wanted to include something of a wildcard here – a pub you never hear referred to as a great Guinness pub – but anytime any of us darkens the doors of the Piper’s, we’re always served some top-class pints. And the fact that you’ll likely get a decent bit of trad to listen to while you sip only sweetens the deal.

(Price: €5.80 as of Summer 2022) 

Click Here for our original post on The Piper’s Corner

The Best 5 Pints of Guinness in Dublin City

Honourable Mentions

Some other places we’ve enjoyed some very good pints in within the canals over the last few years.

  • The Thomas House 
  • Grogans 
  • The Palace 
  • Kehoes 
  • J McNeills 
  • The King’s Inn 
  • Ryan’s (Parkgate)
  • The Old Royal Oak
  • Mulligan’s (Poolbeg) 
  • Briody’s  
  • Walsh’s (Stoneybatter) 
  • O’Connell’s (Portobello) 

Don’t Agree?

I’m sure some of you out there think we’ve gotten things totally wrong here, given that this is the internet. Do feel free to give out to us in the comments and offer your recommendations for great Guinness in Dublin City Centre.

John Kavanagh (The Gravediggers’): Prospect Avenue

It’s early afternoon on a bitter February morning and I’m huddled around the graveside of Fenian Leader – Jeremiah O Donovan Rossa with another dozen cold persons on a guided tour of Glasnevin Cemetery. An actor in full Irish Volunteer regalia is in the throes of his re-enacting of Padraig Pearse’s famous graveside oration. The wind is whipping up in short frenzied bursts which are shaking the surrounding trees, strong trees – nourished on the since-decayed flesh of patriot dead. Haphazardly, this wind is spraying a pin-prick icy drizzle laterally toward my face, aiding it in its apparent attempt to render all exposed flesh numb.

I’m entirely sure that February is a fine month for a great number of things, but even more certain am I that Saint Brigid herself would agree that this is no optimal month for traipsing about on consecrated grounds for prolonged periods in the frost. After an hour or so the otherwise enjoyable tour ends and before I can speak the reddened faces of my companions render moot the question I have in my head. We are all in telepathic agreement that the time has come to seek shelter from the cold – and our chosen location for such is another thing that Brigid would’ve probably been agreeable to, her being the patron saint of beer, and all. We are bound for Kavanagh’s, The Gravediggers.

John Kavanagh (The Gravediggers’): Prospect Avenue

At this particular point in time our having never been to the pub is a shame we carry in secret. We fancy ourselves as knowing a thing or two about the most well-regarded pubs in Dublin and we’re repeatedly deflecting suggestions and changing subjects in order to try and conceal the awful truth. And with this comes the expectation, the hype. It’s not possible for this pub, good and all as we’re sure it will be, to live up to the standard our respective unconsciousness set for their waking counterparts. We find our way out of the cemetery and push back the heavy iron gate and proceed toward the battered wooden door. The world stops. It’s glorious.

Before long, the eight or so of us are burrowed intimately into the last remaining enclave which shier groups, similar in size, might have regarded as too small. Scatters of pints begin to arrive from the bar and arouse, in the faces of their recipients, the sort of joy you might expect to see on that of an exhausted mother postnatally cradling her new-born moments after birth.

Gravedigger's 2

With that, the heat has returned to our faces and the pints and conversation flow in synonymy. Outside, a mutinous streak of sunlight gasps from the grey clouds which could not conceal it, it passes through the windows at the front of the pub and works as best as it can to illuminate the pub before ultimately becoming choked out by the shade therein. And with the light and shade in battle and the joviality and expressiveness around the place you could easily convince yourself that you were inside the frame of a Vermeer or a Caravaggio, if you wanted to. .

This pub is the archetypal Dublin pub – but not just in appearance. A family-run boozer with strong community ties, it’s the very essence of what a Dublin pub should be and the yardstick against which all others should be measured. This is the original model of what so many imposters unfruitfully seek to recreate for profit or glory. To walk into the sepia-toned confines of this pub is to step squarely into the past – each feature is as characterful as the next: be it the smoke-stained ceiling, the bark-chipped table or the saloon doors. There is no coincidence in the fact that the pub has been used in countless TV and movie productions to elicit a sense of days gone by.

And it’s entirely apt that the pub, which opened in 1833, is used for historical programming, as it’s dripping in lore and history. I’ll assume that everyone is already au fait with one about the afters of Luke Kelly’s funeral, and forego that for now. Even more interesting, as Luke too I’m sure would agree, is the fact that the pub and the set of customers who gave it its name are responsible for some of the lingo that’s still commonplace in the modern lexicon. During the war, when glass was in short supply, they say that the grave diggers, weary from their work in the adjoining cemetery, would adjourn for a drink and offer up earthenware jam jars for the purpose of being used as receptacles for their well-earned beer. From there the phrase “Are ye goin’ for a jar” was born.

The pub, they say, is also responsible for the main entrance to Glasnevin Cemetery having to be relocated away from Prospect Avenue to its current one on The Finglas Road. It seems that the delays resulting from mourners who couldn’t resist a liquid detour before the coffin was lowered into the soil were so bad that the only way to combat it was to build an entirely new entrance.

I suppose I should get on to the pint. This is as good as it gets folks, each and every one is a showstopper and I make no hesitation in saying that this pint is the best in Dublin. This fact then, by proxy makes the pint of Guinness in The Gravediggers the best in the country, which in turn then makes it the best pint in the world. And what’s more, is that it’s always charged at a fair price too, the lads could probably charge six quid a pop if they wanted to, but they won’t, the last time we managed to get up that way it was going for €4.80 a measure. A bargain!

So anyone who’s followed our ramblings for the last few years will know that we’ve been a while trying to convey our love for this pub through text. A while being measured in years in this case. I think we’ll never manage to write something that we’re 100% happy with so we’re going to convince ourselves that this one is good enough because if we don’t we’d only end up writing a full book on the pub, which I suppose we couldn’t rule out into the future either.