Substantial road closures are planned for Dublin on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning to accommodate a convoy of 25m-long brewing tanks which will slowly inch their way from Dún Laoghaire Harbour to St James's Gate.
Each of the six stainless steel vessels can hold up to 424,000 litres of beer (750,000 pints) and represent an investment of €10 million by the brewery.
The scale of the task involved in this final leg of their journey to the home of Guinness – they arrived on Sunday by boat from the Netherlands – has required significant planning.
With a detailed traffic management strategy in place for about the last year, the convoy will include two Garda cars and 12 motorcycles undertaking a series of “rolling roadblocks” which will close off segments of the route to traffic to allow the cargo safe passage.
They will move from the harbour at 10pm and are expected on the quays between 1am and 2am.
Residents along the route – taking in the Old Dunleary Road, Monkstown Road, Merrion Road and through the city centre to the quays – will have received advance notice of the operation which will involve clearing large stretches of road.
Once a section has been closed and the flatbed truck gone by, gardaí will reopen the area affected and move on to the next segment.
Alien-like structures
It is not the first time these alien-like structures have passed through the capital – eyebrows were similarly raised last year when another six were transported to Brewhouse No 4, recently opened at St James’s Gate. Those containers, visible on the quays, are similar to what is being transported on Tuesday night. In 2013, 27 such vessels were transported.
They are set to scale up production capacity at the famous brewery. Each year, Diageo exports about €1 billion worth of beer to 130 foreign markets.
“These vessels will enable us to meet the growing demand for our beers and to bring new products into the market,” said operations director Colin O’Brien.
Imported by Dutch company Holvrieka, they were shipped onboard the Wilson Blyth from Rotterdam and were unloaded by crane to Dún Laoghaire pier where they were stored ahead of Tuesday's final leg of the journey.
