An AI voice agent named Rachel called over 3,000 pubs across Ireland’s 32 counties to build the country’s most complete Guinness price index.
Over St. Patrick’s Day weekend 2026, a friendly Northern Irish voice named Rachel rang more than 3,000 pubs across all 32 counties of Ireland to ask a simple question: how much is a pint of Guinness? More than 1,000 gave an answer. Only a handful realised they were speaking to an AI.
A Data Gap 14 Years in the Making
Ireland’s Central Statistics Office stopped tracking pint prices in 2011, leaving consumers without a comprehensive national dataset for over a decade. Matt Cortland, an American AI engineer based in London, set out to fill that gap. The result is the Guinndex — what he describes as the most complete index of Guinness prices ever assembled, designed to bring transparency to a market where costs have grown increasingly inconsistent.
From Pub Owner to AI Engineer
Cortland has an unusual background for this kind of project. A former US-Ireland Alliance Scholar and George Mitchell Scholarship recipient, he holds a master’s degree in Creative Digital Media from Technological University Dublin. He once founded and operated a pub and entertainment company across Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States — including a chain of so-called “wizard bars” where customers used working magic wands. He has since moved into AI engineering and private consulting, building products for clients, several of them based in Dublin.
“I’m a former pub and bar owner, so I know what it’s like to be on the other end of customer pricing calls,” Cortland said. “But I also know what it’s like to be on the consumer end and paying through the nose for a pint. I apologise to everyone I pestered over the weekend. Rachel just wanted a wee drink.”
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Building a Believable Caller
Cortland named the agent Rachel and trained her to be warm, direct, and honest. If asked, she confirms she is an AI and explains she is “putting together a wee price comparison list.” The calls were made using ElevenLabs’ conversational AI platform and Twilio for telephony, placed from an Irish SIM card. Phone numbers were sourced from the Google Maps API. Cortland indexed more than 5,200 pubs across all 32 counties using Google’s Places API.
“Over the weekend, Rachel called the 3,000-plus pubs that had numbers listed,” he said. “Of those, 2,052 answered, and over 1,000 gave a verified price, which I then extracted from the call transcripts using Claude. The whole thing cost about €200 to run, plus a lot of my time.”
Getting the voice right proved to be the most painstaking part of the process. Cortland tested dozens of accents and personas before settling on a Northern Irish voice, inspired by Rachel Duffy, the first female winner of the Irish edition of The Traitors.
“She played an absolute blinder,” he said. “That’s what I wanted — someone warm, someone you’d believe. A Northern Irish accent that makes ‘we were looking to come in for a wee drink’ sound completely natural.”
The script also went through multiple iterations. Early versions had Rachel confirming the price back to the caller — a touch that inadvertently gave people time to grow suspicious. The final version was stripped down: ask the question, say thanks, hang up.
“Funnily enough, the biggest challenge was training her to have banter,” Cortland said. “She really struggled with it. Should have made her American.”
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How Did Staff React?
The calls produced a range of memorable exchanges. At Malzard’s Pub in Kilkenny, the bartender offered to cover the round: “They’re normally €6.20, but if you can’t afford one, we’ll buy you one.” At McIntyre’s Bar in Donegal, the staff launched an impromptu interrogation: “What time is it? How many are coming? Where are you from?” At Buddy’s Bar in Tipperary, Rachel’s polite inquiry was met with two words: “Fuck off.” At The Linen House in Lisburn, Rachel was routed into a Premier Inn phone system, where two AI assistants talked past each other for several exchanges. Nobody got a pint price.
Pat Hayes, owner of The Arch Bar in Thurles, Tipperary, was among those who took Rachel’s call. When he later learned he had been speaking to an AI, he was unbothered.
“It was a good laugh. I had no idea it wasn’t a real person,” Hayes said. “But knowing the price of a pint is important. People want to know what they’re paying before they walk in the door. If someone’s putting together an index of every pub in the country, fair play to them.”
What the Data Shows
The national average price of a pint of Guinness is €5.95. The most common price is €5.50. Dublin is the most expensive county by a significant margin, averaging €6.75 a pint, while Laois is the cheapest, at €5.38. The single cheapest pint in the index is €3.00 at Glynn’s Bar in Dunmore, Co. Galway — though Cortland allows that the barman may have been having him on. The most expensive is €10 at The Auld Dubliner in Dublin, which, he notes, appears to be accurate.
The Guinndex also found that of the 46 pubs in Ireland with a perfect 5.0 Google rating, not one is in Dublin. They are in places like Augher in Tyrone, Kilmakilloge in Kerry, and Rathdowney in Laois.
Since the CSO last tracked pint prices in 2011, the cost of a stout has risen from €3.93 to €5.95, an increase of 51 percent.
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What Comes Next
Cortland is now turning the Guinndex into a crowdsourced platform. The full dataset is live at guinndex.ai, with an interactive map, county-by-county breakdowns, and a “Contribute” button allowing anyone to submit or correct a local price.
“I want to see if we can collectively drive down the cost of a pint across Ireland,” he said. “Rachel found the first thousand prices. The rest will need to come from people. If you’re sitting there with a pint right now, tell us what you paid.”
