Someone Stole 70,000 Pints of Guinness in England, and Yes, We’re Forgiving the Pun

Guinness is famously good for you, according to the old tagline, but only once it’s actually been paid for. That’s the line Cheshire Police reached for after thieves in England made off with roughly 70,000 pints of the stuff, and it’s hard to blame them, because this story genuinely does not write itself.

At a Glance

What was taken	About 800 barrels of Guinness (roughly 70,000-70,400 pints) plus the two trailers hauling them
Value	£115,000 in Guinness ($155,000) + £50,000 in trailers ($67,000), £205,000 total ($275,000)
Where	Whitehouse Industrial Estate, Aston Lane, Runcorn, near Liverpool, England
When	Two separate thefts on the night of Monday, August 31
Who’s investigating	Cheshire Constabulary, appealing for witnesses and dashcam footage

Two Trucks, Two Thefts, One Very Bad Night for Diageo

According to Cheshire Police, the theft happened in two separate incidents at the same site on the night of August 31. A lorry pulled into the Whitehouse Industrial Estate on Aston Lane, in Runcorn, and connected to a waiting HGV trailer loaded with barrels of Guinness before driving off at around 7:55pm, heading toward the Mersey Gateway bridge. A second lorry arrived at the same site roughly 75 minutes later, hitched up to a second trailer, and left at around 9:30pm in the direction of Rainhill and Watkinson Way.

Diageo, which owns Guinness, runs a packaging warehouse at that site. The barrels, each holding around 88 pints, had been packed and ready to go out to pubs. Instead, about 800 of them left in the wrong direction.

Police say the total haul, Guinness and trailers combined, comes to around £205,000, or roughly $275,000. Cheshire Police have released partial descriptions of the drivers: one is described as white with a short dark beard, wearing a beanie hat; the other was wearing a cap. Both HGVs reportedly carry unique identifying numbers, DL736 and DL542, printed in the top left corner of their rear doors, which police are hoping someone spots.

“It is famously said that ‘Guinness is good for you,’ but that is only the case when it has been bought and paid for. We will settle for nothing less than the full recovery of all the items stolen.”, Det. Sgt. Gary McClatchy, Cheshire Constabulary

Not Even the Biggest Beer Heist of the Month

As eye-catching as 70,000 pints of stout sounds, this is actually the second major beer theft to make international headlines in a matter of weeks. In late August, roughly 34,000 to 50,000 cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon disappeared from a Southern California warehouse, a theft the brewery leaned into with a cheeky Instagram post (“we don’t fault you for wanting to brag to your friends how much PBR you have, we just wish you obtained it the honorable way”). Pabst has since put up a reward of up to $20,000 for information leading to the beer’s recovery.

Cargo theft, generally, is a much bigger and much less funny problem than either of these stories makes it look. Freight theft in both the US and UK has been climbing for years, and full-truckload beer and beverage shipments are a repeat target: they’re high-value, easy to resell fast through informal channels, and, unlike electronics or pharmaceuticals, nobody’s expecting a serial number check when a pallet of stout shows up cheap. Two headline-grabbing beer heists inside a month doesn’t mean beer theft is suddenly trending, it just means two of the usual, unglamorous truck thefts that happen every week finally had a detail (34,000 cans of PBR, 70,000 pints of Guinness) strange enough to make the news.

What Happens Next

Cheshire Police say they’re not interested in a partial recovery. They’ve asked anyone with information, or dashcam footage from the Aston Lane area around 7:45pm on August 31, to come forward, quoting incident reference IML-2408641. Given that 800 barrels of beer is a genuinely difficult thing to quietly resell, distribute, or hide, whoever’s holding it now has a bigger logistics problem than the crime itself. Selling a stolen truckload of Guinness at market price without anyone asking where it came from is, in its own way, harder than stealing it.