Everyone familiar with Guinness knows the brand for its stouts. There’s the crowd favorite Draught Stout, as well as Extra Stout, Foreign Extra Stout, and the more recently launched non-alcoholic offering Guinness 0.0. But several times throughout its modern history, Guinness has made attempts to diversify its portfolio, trying its hand at other styles.
There was Guinness Cold Brew Coffee Beer which, despite rave reviews, was discontinued by parent company Diageo in late 2023 after less than 18 months on the market. In 1998, Guinness launched a not-so-beloved wheat ale, Guinness Breó, as a U.K. exclusive, but that got pulled from the market in 2000. The brand rolled out a golden lager called Hop House 13 in 2015, and while it’s still available in some markets, its distribution footprint has waned in recent years.
But among the list of Guinness beers that once were, one lesser-known, short-lived offering seems to have been all but erased from history: Guinness Enigma draught lager. The brand offers no information about the brew itself, and subsequent research only reveals an old TV ad from the ‘90s, some vintage branded glassware, an article about its discontinuation, and a few forums where fans mourn its demise.
So what exactly was Guinness Enigma, and why did the brand scrap it just a few years after its debut?
What we do know is that Enigma was a 5 percent ABV golden lager packaged with the same in-can widget Guinness uses in its Draught Stout. According to U.K.-based publication Marketing Week, after a delayed rollout due to “production problems,” the beer launched in April 1995. To promote the release, Guinness tapped Parisian advertising agency Publicis Groupe, and the resulting campaign featured a dream-like, surrealist TV ad depicting a man walking through a shapeshifting desert before being offered “a glass of the unusual” by a dapper server. The drinker remarks that the beer is “very smooth,” and then the server turns into a Dali-esque piano and vanishes in a burst of flames. Lastly, the words “a lager born of genius” slide onto the screen in the final few frames.
Guinness reportedly spent £4.4 million (roughly £8.24 million in 2025) on the campaign, making it the third most expensive beer marketing effort in 1995. Early on, it appeared to be money well spent, as Marketing Week cites that initial sales accounted for 2.4 percent of the U.K. premium lager market. However, after the Enigma ads stopped airing in late 1995, sales dropped to 1.7 percent of the same market by January 1996. Some accounts stopped carrying the lager, and it seemed like Enigma was already on its way out.
The curious part about the beer’s quick downturn is the discrepancy between consumer testimonials and media reports. Several Facebook posts from 2024 on the Guinness Community group prompted a flurry of nostalgic comments about Enigma. “Shame they stopped it,” wrote group member Shaun Haynes. “It was really refreshing, a very crisp lager,” wrote Steven Butler, another Facebook user. An entry about Guinness Enigma on open-source blog BeerBible.net sparked several similar remarks, with one commenter calling the beer the “best lager I’ve ever drunk.”
On the contrary, the May 1996 report from Marketing Week claimed that “some trade observers dismiss Enigma as a complete flop while buyers say it just ticks over.” Rather than spend more money on advertising or reformulating the product, Guinness simply dropped the price of the beer, making it more affordable, but also damaging its image as a premium offering. According to a 2008 article from another U.K.-based publication, Talking Retail, the in-can widget used in Enigma wasn’t well suited for lagers — only ales and stouts.
In 1997, Guinness merged with British conglomerate Grand Metropolitan to form Diageo, and the newly formed entity officially scrapped Enigma at the tail end of 1998. At the time, former Guinness GB (Great Britain) managing director Gary Matthews told Marketing Week that “Guinness GB’s stout portfolio accounts for 85 percent of our business and it is an area we will be focusing our efforts on in the future.”
To Diageo’s credit, choosing to push the Guinness stout portfolio proved fruitful in the long run, but given the stout’s current success, a 2025 relaunch of Enigma with the right marketing — and widget — would probably go gangbusters. For now, though, Guinness Enigma’s legacy lives on as, well, an enigma.
