Ivana Lowell was visiting family in Ireland at Leixlip Castle, the then home of her cousin Desmond Guinness—a great-great-great-great-grandson of brewery founder Arthur Guinness—when inspiration struck. An episode of Downton Abbey “was kind of on in the background,” she remembers. “But we’re talkers and we’re drinkers.” She laughs. “I was looking around, and I just thought, Oh my God. Our family would make such a good TV series. It’s got everything: drama and money and beer. And best of all, it’s all true.”
So Lowell got to work writing a treatment. As a daughter of Lady Caroline Blackwood, the eldest child of brewery heir Maureen Guinness and Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, the Fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, she grew up hearing the lore surrounding the family’s rags-to-extreme-riches story. “My mother was a great storyteller and writer,” she tells VF of Caroline, who was known for her ethereal beauty—and for rejecting her aristocratic roots in favor of a bohemian lifestyle, as well as relationships with artistic men. “My grandmother was [also] a great storyteller.”
Maureen was one of three beautiful sisters known in the 1920s as the golden Guinness girls. Their father, Ernest Guinness, was a son of Edward Guinness, the First Earl of Iveagh, and is depicted in the show Lowell helped dream up, which would eventually be called House of Guinness. The series premieres Thursday on Netflix.
“There were various myths about how Arthur created the beer. I actually had him burning the hops,” says Lowell—one possible explanation for how the black stout first achieved its distinctive quality. “Then he inherited one pound from the Archbishop of Kelsey, whom he worked for [as a porter], and with that pound, he started his own brewery in Celbridge. It went on to become the big brewery that’s now in St. James’s Gate in Dublin.”
Several years later, writer Steven Knight agreed to be the show’s brewmaster. The Peaky Blinders creator had been working on a World War II drama, Rogue Heroes, with the production company that was handling Lowell’s treatment. Knowing of his personal interest in beer—Knight, who also cocreated Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, once ran his own brewery called Freedom Beer Company—they approached him about creating a show.
“I discovered in doing research that the characters almost spoke for themselves,” Knight tells VF. “There is this consistency of unconventional characters who are very compelling, all the way through to the 1960s. They had this particular outlook on life [that,] as a dramatist, was an absolute gift to discover.”
Meeting Lowell at a London pub sealed the deal. The only hiccup was that the place didn’t have any Guinness on tap, and the proprietor had to send out for some. “We just got on so well,” says Lowell. Though she was tempted to give Knight notes after receiving his first script, she thought better of it. “We had a few conversations [because] he just wanted to make sure that certain things were accurate. But once he got writing, he just did his thing.”
