Wetherspoons founder Tim Martin champions SURGE in Guinness popularity - 'It's fashionable!'

Yes, it's a real surprise. I think it's always been a popular drink among the demographic you mentioned, the older guy. And I think what the story behind it is about 80 or 90% of pub trade over the last 30 or 40 years, and probably longer, are a similar range of products, but there's a varying 10, 20% according to fashion. So fashion has got a lot to answer for. So you had a lot of, you had vodka Red Bull 20 years ago, you had an Irish cider poured over ice which came from no one knows where, you had Alco pops, so unpredictable range of products which have been the fashion of the moment. But the fashion of the moment, very unpredictably, this time is Guinness, and no one knows why as you say it's an acquired taste. Young people tend not to like it. Most of the fashionable drinks over the decades have been quite sweet, and Guinness obviously isn't. So yes, I think the Guinness Brewery, St. James's Gate in Dublin, they'll say it's brilliant marketing, but like the rest of us they rely a bit on luck.

Only on draft. The old days we sold it in a bottle as well, nowadays only on draft. And it's if it's not the top seller, it's very close, and in many pubs it's the top seller. So my old man worked for Guinness for 31 years, my late dad. So he would have been so pleased to have seen this. He worked because Guinness sells all around the world, and when he was working there we lived in New Zealand, in Jamaica, in Malaysia, in Ireland. So it's got a world heritage.

That is a bridge too far. But Guinness are very good actually as a company for checking on the seller standards, the pouring standards, and they actually come in and to credit the pubs. And we do pretty well, but Guinness themselves do a very good job on checking their own products, which will have contributed to the success.

I think that it's very unpredictable. The circumstances that have happened: first of all the lockdown, and then people assumed almost universally, including us probably, that once the lockdown finished there would be a boom, but there wasn't. And I think what happened is we're all creatures of habit more than we realize, and having been going to the supermarkets for a considerable time, people stayed at home and went to the supermarket. It's recovered now pretty well for us. Our sales are considerably over where they were pre-pandemic, but it's been a hell of a few years.

It's possible to get away without selling food. It's not a legal requirement, but if you don't sell food you've obviously got a much narrower market. And food now for us is nearly 40% of sales; 30 years ago was 5%.