Someone in northwest England is sitting on enough stout to fill roughly 70,000 pint glasses, after thieves made off with two full trailer truckloads of Guinness from a depot near Runcorn, close to Liverpool. Cheshire Constabulary says the beer, destined for pubs, was taken Monday night when two drivers pulled up to an industrial park and simply drove the loaded trailers away.
Police estimate the stolen stout — roughly 800 barrels in all — is worth about £115,000 ($155,000), with the two trailers themselves adding another £50,000 ($67,000) to the loss. Detective Sergeant Gary McClatchy did not hide his irritation, or his pun, in a statement on the case:
It is famously said that "Guinness is good for you," but that is only the case when it has been bought and paid for. We will settle for nothing less than the full recovery of all the items stolen.
Det. Sgt. Gary McClatchy, Cheshire Constabulary
As of this week, according to reporting on the case, no arrests had been announced and the beer, trailers and thieves all remained missing.
A season of brazen beer heists
The Guinness theft follows a similarly bold, if smaller, beer crime a few weeks earlier in Southern California, where roughly 34,000 cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon worth about $70,000 were stolen from the same warehouse twice in a single day. Pabst leaned into the absurdity of it, offering a $20,000 reward and posting a cheeky message to the thief on social media rather than a straightforward appeal. Coverage of the Guinness case has drawn the same comparison, noting that large-volume beer theft — while rare enough to make headlines each time — is not entirely without precedent on either side of the Atlantic.
For Guinness, brewed by Diageo-owned St. James's Gate in Dublin and one of the most recognizable beer brands in the world, the theft is more embarrassing than existential; the missing stout represents a tiny fraction of what the brewery ships to British pubs in a given week. It's not clear whether Diageo has offered any reward of its own or commented publicly beyond deferring to the police investigation.
Cheshire Constabulary says its inquiry is ongoing and has asked anyone with information — including, presumably, anyone who has recently come into an unusually large supply of stout — to come forward. Unless the trailers turn up first, the case may end up as one more entry in a small but growing catalogue of beer-related capers making the rounds this year.
