Guinness, the famous stout widely considered to be the national drink of Ireland, is a borderline obsession with its fans. But obsessions have their price, and now AI is being enlisted to track the price of a pint of the black across Ireland. And while the result is enlightening and often entertaining, it calls into question whether a pint can be judged on price alone.
Our story begins with Matt Cortland, an American AI engineer now based in London and a former pub owner, who wondered if the price he just paid for a pint of Guinness was a fair one. Astonished that there was no government tracking data to resolve the question, Cortland built an AI voice agent named Rachel to call thousands of pubs and ask the price of a Guinness pint. Rachel was created with a Northern Ireland accent inspired by the voice of Rachel Duffy from a TV show called The Traitors and she was instructed to be polite. Cortland used the voice and agent platform ElevenLabs and the communications platform Twilio to make the calls. Rachel made over 3,000 calls across Ireland and most barmen responded to Rachel as if it were a real person. The only real difficulty occurred when the Rachel AI communicated with one pub’s automated phone system and failed to get a price.
Claude AI was used to extract the prices from call recordings. Cortland then began “pouring the data” into a website called Guinndex.ai. The Guinndex features a searchable index by county and pub name. Dublin is the priciest spot for a pint which is no surprise. The Temple Bar Pub in Dublin is already well-known for its pricey pint but visitors also may be paying for the live music that is a mainstay of the establishment. There also is a list of pubs where you will get change from a fiver. But most pubs are within a euro of each other. Humans, meanwhile, continue to update the site with current pricing. One variant not tracked is Guinness Zero, the nonalcoholic choice.
The Guinndex also contains lists that might come in handy during a pub quiz. The Hairy Lemon and John Kavanagh “The Gravediggers” top the list of most colorful pub names, competing alongside 38 pubs named Ryan. Some more rural establishments double as grocers and hardware stores, with one pub in Wexford also listed as an undertaker.
But whether the price of a pint of Guinness can be separated from the full Irish pub experience is perhaps immeasurable. A key element is what the Irish call “the craic,” a term that translates into a measure of the overall pub atmosphere. That remains a distinctly human calculation.
