Guinness Storehouse and The Liberties: St James's Gate, Gravity Bar and Distilleries

West of Christ Church Cathedral along High Street, Thomas Street, and James's Street lies The Liberties (postcode D08), one of Dublin's oldest working-class neighbourhoods. Named after the medieval manor jurisdictions (liberties) outside the municipal city walls that answered to the Archbishop of Dublin and the Abbey of St Thomas the Martyr, the district attracted Huguenot silk and poplin weavers in the seventeenth century before growing into the world capital of porter brewing and pot-still whiskey distilling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

St James's Gate and the 9,000-year lease

On 31 December 1759, a thirty-four-year-old brewer named Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on a disused four-acre brewery at St James's Gate for an annual rent of forty-five pounds. Starting with Dublin ales before shifting in the 1770s and 1790s to dark porter and extra stout brewed with roasted barley, the brewery expanded across both sides of James's Street down to Victoria Quay on the River Liffey, where barges once carried wooden casks out to sea-going steamers at Dublin Port.

The visitor entrance to the Guinness Storehouse sits on Market Street off Bellevue, housed inside a seven-storey steel-framed fermentation plant built between 1902 and 1904 in the Chicago School architectural style (the first multi-storey steel-framed building erected in the British Isles). Transformed in 2000 around a giant glass-and-steel central atrium shaped like a pint glass, the self-guided route rises floor by floor through the four brewing ingredients: Irish-grown malted and roasted barley, hops, the brewery's heritage yeast strain, and mountain water piped from Lough Tay and the Poulaphouca Reservoir in the Wicklow Mountains (not from the River Liffey, as urban myth often claims).

Tasting rooms, cooperage history and the Gravity Bar

Upper floors of the Storehouse examine the nineteenth-century narrow-gauge brewery railway engineered by Samuel Geoghegan, the traditional art of the St James's Gate coopers who shaped oak barrels by hand, and nearly a century of advertising campaigns created by illustrator John Gilroy (including the famous toucan, sea lion, and ostrich posters introduced in the 1930s). Visitors can practice pouring a two-part pint at the Guinness Academy before riding the lift to the seventh-floor Gravity Bar. Wrapped in floor-to-ceiling glass above the rooftops of The Liberties, the circular bar includes a complimentary pint of Guinness Draught, Guinness 0.0, or a soft drink with every standard admission ticket while looking north across the Liffey to the Dublin Mountains and south to the Wicklow hills. Always book your timed entry slot online via the official Guinness Storehouse site before visiting.

Thomas Street, St Patrick's Tower and the Liberties whiskey revival

Rather than taking a taxi straight back to the centre after the Storehouse, spend an afternoon walking the historic streets of The Liberties:

• St Patrick's Tower and the Roe Distillery site: Rising above the corner of Thomas Street and Watling Street is the 46-metre brick smock windmill of St Patrick's Tower, built in 1757 and crowned with a copper dome and statue of St Patrick; it once powered George Roe and Co.'s Thomas Street Distillery, the largest whiskey distillery in the world during the late nineteenth century.
• Teeling Whiskey Distillery (Newmarket Square): Opened in 2015 as the first new operational distillery built in Dublin in over 125 years, offering guided tours of its copper pot stills and tastings of small-batch Irish whiskey.
• Pearse Lyons Distillery (James's Street): Housed inside the deconsecrated twelfth- to nineteenth-century Church of St James, where twin copper stills stand beneath stained-glass windows depicting Ireland's brewing and distilling history.
• St Catherine's Church (Thomas Street): Completed in 1769 by architect John Smyth with a granite Doric facade outside which United Irishmen leader Robert Emmet was executed on 20 September 1803.

From St James's Gate, you can walk fifteen minutes west to Kilmainham Gaol and the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, or fifteen minutes east past St Patrick's Cathedral to Dublin Castle.