Happy St. Pat's Day: Time to Remind You That Guinness is Not Really That Irish

This time The Economist Mag takes up the case:

Arthur Guinness, who founded the brewery in Dublin in 1759, might have been surprised that his drink would one day become such a potent national symbol. He was a committed unionist and opponent of Irish nationalism, who before the Irish Rebellion of 1798 was even accused of spying for the British authorities. His descendants continued passionately to support unionism—one giving the Ulster Volunteer Force £10,000 in 1913 (about £1m, or $1.7m, in today’s money) to fund a paramilitary campaign to resist Ireland being given legislative independence. The company was alleged to have lent men and equipment to the British army to help crush Irish rebels during the Easter Rising of 1916, afterwards firing members of staff whom it believed to have Irish-nationalist sympathies.

The beer the company has become most famous for—porter stout—was based on a London ale, a favourite of the street porters of Covent Garden and Billingsgate markets. Since 1886 the firm has floated on the London Stock Exchange, and the company moved its headquarters to London in 1932, where it has been based ever since (it merged with Grand Metropolitan and renamed itself Diageo in 1997). Even in terms of branding, the company was considering disassociating itself from its Irish reputation as recently as the 1980s. Worried about the impact on sales of the IRA’s terrorist campaign during the Troubles, Guinness came close in 1982 to re-launching the brand as an English beer brewed in west London. But as Northern Ireland’s situation improved in the 1990s, the company’s marketing strategy changed again towards marketing the beer as Irish, aiming its product at tourists in Ireland and the estimated 70m people of Irish descent living around the world. Now the Guinness Storehouse, part of the original Dublin factory which was reopened as a tourist attraction in 2000, promotes Guinness to tourists as an Irish beer once again.

But for economists, the real story of Guinness is the Student's T-Distribution, from the authoritative Wikipedia:

In the English-language literature it takes its name from William Sealy Gosset's 1908 paper in Biometrika under the pseudonym "Student". Gosset worked at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin, Ireland, and was interested in the problems of small samples, for example of the chemical properties of barley where sample sizes might be as low as 3. One version of the origin of the pseudonym is that Gosset's employer preferred staff to use pen names when publishing scientific papers instead of their real name, therefore he used the name "Student". so he had to hide his identity. Another version is that Guinness did not want their competitors to know that they were using the t-test to test the quality of raw material.

Gosset's paper refers to the distribution as the "frequency distribution of standard deviations of samples drawn from a normal population". It became well-known through the work of Ronald A. Fisher, who called the distribution "Student's distribution" and referred to the value as t.

So raise a Guinness today not for Ireland, but for Econometrics!