DUBLIN, Ireland - The most popular tourist attraction here used to be the Book of Kells, an ornate manuscript created 800 years after Jesus' birth that is stored on the Gothic campus of Trinity College.
Now, the most popular attraction is a beer factory.
But not any beer factory.
Guinness, one of the oldest and best-known companies in Ireland, spent $40 million to transform a vacant, outdated fermentation plant into a seven-story visitor and conference center.
The site drew nearly 600,000 people in its inaugural year, which was hampered by tourist fears over the agricultural hoof-and-mouth disease and the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in the United States. Guinness expects eventually to reach 1 million visitors a year.
The so-called Guinness Storehouse is more like the Disney World of beer than a faux plant tour. It includes an indoor waterfall, walk-through vats as large as two-car garages and a circular rooftop bar with the most spectacular view in the center of Ireland's ancient capital city.
"That's the `wow' factor," company spokeswoman Jane Doyle says of the so-called Gravity Bar. "People don't expect when they ride up on the glass lift [elevator] to see that kind of view of the city."
"This is the best-kept secret in Dublin," crows a bartender here, David Johnston, 23, of Tipperary.
Not quite, anymore.
Bill Clinton was one of the first visitors, arriving a week after the attraction opened in December 2000. American country music star Emmy Lou Harris has been here. So has the British girl-band Atomic Kitten. The U.S. Marines held a birthday bash here. And a few weeks ago, Ireland's Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, a frequent visitor, arrived to present awards to the country's biggest rugby, soccer and Gaelic football stars.
The company previously received tourists in an old vat house nearby. Attendance had grown to almost a half-million a year there, much more than the place could handle. So company officials brainstormed, deciding in 1996 to renovate a storehouse that had been empty for about a decade.
Actually, the building had some claim to fame in its own right. It was built in 1904 as the first steel-grade structure in the British Isles. Guinness executives had traveled to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century for some beer-making tips and returned home instead with new ideas about factory construction and design, says Randal Suttle, an architect with Robinson Keefe Devane, the Dublin firm that worked on the recent remodel.
