It took 27 million bricks to build the Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouse in 1900. It was thought to be the biggest brick building in the world at the time, and its 150,000 square metres still loom over Liverpool’s Stanley Dock like a monument to an extinct civilisation. Today, the part of the warehouse that hasn’t already been redeveloped into luxury flats has, along with its smaller (though still massive) neighbour, been transfigured into Dublin’s St. James’s Gate Brewery, which has pumped out Guinness since 1759.

We’re in 1868, when the curtain goes up on the debut series of House of Guinness, a new Netflix production from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. Production designer Richard Bullock says his team did the regular St. James’s Gate Brewery tourist tour to help with accuracy. It certainly feels accurate. Horses clop around on set. Extras in bowler hats shovel fake coal into mocked-up furnaces. A small train for hauling Guinness barrels runs on a railway line down the alley between the two warehouses.

There are, as with any good Steven Knight show, plenty of smoke machines about.

House of Guinness is about the family behind the “black stuff”. It was one of the richest in Ireland and Britain at the time, with a groaning property portfolio and considerable political influence, thanks to its empire of stout. And 1868 is when the family goes through a very Succession-esque succession crisis. Benjamin Guinness, the grandson of the brewery’s founder Arthur, has died. His four children – Arthur (played by Anthony Boyle), Benjamin (Fionn O’Shea), Edward (Louis Partridge) and Anne (Emily Fairn) – gather to hear his will. Benjamin junior is a drunk. Arthur is more interested in politics and has informally agreed to hand over his share of the brewery to Edward.

Benjamin senior has other plans: his will specifies that Arthur and Edward must run the company together or forfeit their entire inheritance. “If you were writing fiction,” says Knight, “you’d invent that, and people would say, ‘Really?’ But this is real.” His interest in the Guinnesses was partly triggered by a meeting with a modern member of the family, Ivana Lowell, who inducted him into Guinness gossip and gave him a first-hand impression of the family’s “slightly bonkers, posh, reckless, fun feeling”, which has permeated through the generations. Knight is a Guinness drinker, and even had a spell in the 2000s running a (much smaller-scale) family brewery himself. But it was the story of Arthur and Edward, forced by their dead dad to work together, that made him realise there was television to be made.

The opening episodes of House of Guinness are clear on what an unlikely pairing the brothers are. Anthony Boyle’s Arthur is charming and stylish, but has secrets – one scene being filmed at the brewery is his rendezvous with a gay lover – and a volcanic temper. We get a bit of Oscar Wilde in his fur-lined coat and dandyish curled moustache, and “a bit of Hitler and a bit of Donald Trump” in his thundering political oratory, says Boyle. Louis Partridge’s Edward is a dour workhouse with lots of business plans but no friends. Partridge says he “had a lot of fun arguing with Anthony” in the long, dialogue-filled scenes Knight wrote.

The two actors themselves disagree, gently, on their characters’ Succession parallels. Boyle says Arthur is “a mixture between Kendall and Logan” Roy – a man with a daddy complex who’s also “a tyrant in his own right”. Partridge thinks Arthur is more like the feckless Roman Roy. “My character would be Kendall or Logan; maybe more Kendall, who takes it all really seriously. I’m going to veto [Boyle’s] answer.”

Sean Rafferty, played by James Norton, is a fictional brewery foreman and the brothers’ fixer-slash-enforcer: swaggering and menacing, and not averse to some light torture to get his way. The smoky, fiery brewery set seems built for him more than for his upper-class bosses. Norton says he was one of the “token Englishmen” on set: the rest of the cast is heavy on Irish actors, including Jack Gleeson – Game of Thrones’ Joffrey Baratheon – in one of his first roles since returning to acting after a multi-year hiatus. Working with him was “such a fucking joy”, says Boyle. “We’re so thankful that he’s back.”

And when you pull a bunch of Irish and British actors together for a TV series about Guinness, you’d expect them to drink a bit of it too. On camera, it was non-alcoholic, off-the-shelf Guinness 0.0, though Partridge was convinced “that if you drink enough of it within a scene, you can start to feel pretty woozy”. In the evenings, they got stuck into the regular stuff. “My record’s been about five [pints a session] on this job,” says Partridge; Norton says the cast spent plenty of time in Liverpool’s Irish bars, including the well-known Shenanigan’s.

Knight had no idea that Guinness would be the beer of the moment by the time his series came out, though he’s obviously pleased with the coincidence – in a world of splitting-the-G and pelican-branded merch, House of Guinness can practically market itself. And with Fontaines D.C. and Kneecap needle drops in the first episode, the show has deftly hitched itself to the ascendency of Irish culture going on right now.

Much of its drama takes place away from the brewery. Partly, it’s in the world of politics: Arthur Guinness was elected a Conservative MP for Dublin, and House of Guinness includes several “Fenians” agitating for Ireland’s independence at a time when the country was firmly part of Britain. But mostly, it’s in the world of castles, and their ballrooms. We never forget the Guinnesses are really, really rich. Stately homes across the UK were used as stand-ins for family properties. Bullock’s production team nosed around Iveagh House, the Guinnesses’ Dublin residence at the time, but couldn’t film there – because it’s now the Irish government’s foreign ministry.

The siblings were born into this wealth, and it needed to show. Boyle made sure Arthur would walk past priceless paintings with his head down, barely noticing them. Partridge says that one of the directors, Tom Shankland, had to tell him to stop acknowledging the actors playing servants. “That’s how it is. He brings you the drink; you don’t even look at him.” Arthur’s lavish marriage includes a scene where Edward sits alone, scowling, at a massive table. “I felt like Scarface or something,” says Partridge.

So far, so 1860s Succession. But Knight – who hasn’t actually seen Succession, or other on-screen dissections of wealth like The White Lotus – says the 19th-century Guinnesses had “an obligation or a compulsion towards virtue, which I don’t think exists now amongst the super-rich”. Hence the family’s formidable record of philanthropy. And if we tend to think of the Roys as joyless, and trapped in the gilded case of their billions, the Guinnesses always had, he says, “a sense of fun. They are aware of their own absurdity. There’s a joy about these people and this story, which continues to this day. When you meet a Guinness, it’s normally someone who’s a laugh.”

Browsing Wikipedia and tabloid archives will show you how colourful, if often tragic, the wider Guinness story is. Though this first series focuses on the immediate aftermath of Benjamin Guinness’s death, there’s material for many, many more – for an era-skipping epic in the style of The Crown, maybe. Knight can’t confirm anything but doesn’t deny his ambitions. “As far as we are all concerned,” he says, “this is just the beginning.”

By Josiah Gogarty / Source; GQ.com