United Nations of Beer

Guinness T-Shirt: Silver Toucan

by Tom
(Salem, MA)

Guinness T-Shirt: Silver Toucan
(Amazon)

As featured on this women's T-Shirt, the large-beaked toucan has been associated with Guinness beer since the 1930s, when an iconic series of advertisements drawn by John Gilroy helped cement the brand in the public consciousness.

Many of these advertisements touted the health benefits of Guinness, with slogans such as "Guinness is good for you" or "Guinness makes you strong". Any brand of beer that attempted to do this today would fall afoul of so many regulations that they would probably be out of business by the time the lawyers sorted it all out.

The question is not why Guinness touted its healthfulness, but why they thought people would trust the opinion of a Toucan.

Toucans are not particularly well known for their knowledge of human anatomy. In the last 100 years, only one toucan has qualified as a medical doctor and it is believed that he may have been a penguin in disguise.

Toucans regularly worked as doctors (or 'beaks') prior to 1900, when standards were considerably lower, and it may have been memories of this time that led Guinness to use the toucan. A series of scandals involving botched surgeries where half-eaten fruits were sewn inside patients led to toucans being run out of the medical profession.

Ironically, Guinness stopped using the toucan in their advertisements after a series of scandals involving half eaten fruits in bottles of Guinness...