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Press Release: Pints and Power Explores Irish Identity and Belonging Through the Ritual of a Shared Pint

Michael Villa’s new cultural memoir blends personal narrative and Irish pub history through the lens of Guinness.

Worcester, MA | January 26, 2026

In Pints and Power: Where History, Heart and the Pint Converge, author Michael Villa presents a cultural memoir about how a pint of Guinness can become a vessel for identity, ritual, and belonging across generations. Blending personal narrative with cultural history, the book focuses on the meaning found in shared spaces and in the communities that form around a familiar pour.

Villa begins with a simple premise. A pint of Guinness can carry weight for reasons that have nothing to do with alcohol. From there, Pints and Power reflects on how the iconic stout has come to symbolize continuity, memory, and connection, particularly within Irish culture and its global diaspora.

Villa is not Irish by birth, but the book begins with a question that many readers will recognize. What do you do with an identity you were not born into, but still carry through family, memory, and shared experience? That personal search is part of what drives the reporting and reflection at the heart of Pints and Power.

The book moves between history and lived experience and examines how pubs have long served as places of refuge, storytelling, and communal identity. Through conversations with bartenders, musicians, emigrants, and everyday patrons, Villa captures the human stories that gather around the bar. These voices highlight moments of joy and grief, celebration and loss, and show how the ritual of the pour can become a shared language when words fall short.

The project is grounded in research and reporting. Villa’s work includes a visit to the Guinness Archives in Dublin, along with on-the-ground observation in Irish and Irish-American pub settings. The book also draws on dozens of interviews conducted during the writing process with bartenders, musicians, emigrants, and everyday patrons. The result is a narrative that pairs lived experience with cultural context and treats the pint as a lens for understanding migration, resilience, and belonging.

The memoir also considers silence and song and explores how pub spaces can function as emotional crossroads where unspoken histories surface and collective memory is preserved. Villa’s writing emphasizes atmosphere and feeling and invites readers into rooms where laughter, music, and remembrance intertwine. The pint becomes both an anchor and a witness to lives in motion.

Rather than presenting Guinness as nostalgia or novelty, Villa treats it as a cultural artifact that carries stories of migration, resilience, and belonging. Pints and Power suggests that community is often formed through repeated, shared moments.

Written for readers drawn to Ireland, cultural memoir, and the spaces where people gather, Pints and Power will resonate with anyone who has found comfort, clarity, or kinship across a bar top.