Guinness heiress brews drama about her family

"Succession with beer and brutality" is how The Times of London neatly summarised the period series, which stars British actors James Norton and Louis Partridge.

- Guy Trebay

It begins with the death of the brand’s 19th-century proprietor, Sir Benjamin Guinness, at the time the richest man in Ireland, and tracks the fortunes of his four children as they fight for control of an empire built on stout.

Lowell, 59, had the idea for a show more than a decade ago while spending the Christmas holidays with her cousin, the Anglo-Irish aesthete Desmond Guinness —son of a baron and the most notorious of the Mitford sisters - at his 12th-century castle in County Kildare.

“I was staying with Desmond and many other Guinnesses at Leixlip,” Lowell said by phone from London. “We were halfheartedly watching TV series Downton Abbey and I thought, ‘Oh, our family is so much more interesting and eccentric.”

Back home in Sag Harbor, New York, she wrote up a treatment outlining the tale of the beer’s creation by inventor Arthur Guinness - “He’s the one on the bottle,” she said — and tracing the arc of the family fortunes to Sir Benjamin, by then proprietor of the largest brewery in Europe.