Lockdown Guinness Still Meeting a Merry End

As much as it may hurt fans of the black stuff to hear, thousands of pints of Guinness went un-drunk during the European COVID-19 lockdown. But while the beer is tragically not being enjoyed, it's meeting a merry end: It's being used to fertilize Christmas trees.

Lucky Christmas trees.

You see, without customers, pub owners throughout Europe were forced to return "hundreds of thousands of kegs" of beer to Guinness' flagship brewery at St James' Gate in Dublin, Aidan Crowe, the brewery's director of operations tells Sky News.

"You'd probably make me cry if I started to add it all up...and we've still got some products to decant and we've still got some markets that haven't finished returning their beer to us," he explains, saying simply, "A lot of beer and a lot of kegs."

With lockdown easing, however, the time to bend the ol' elbow is returning. Guinness' owner Diageo has donated tens of millions of pounds to get pub owners back on their feet after the shutdowns, and help them make their establishments "COVID-19-secure."