For a stout pour, take it to New Max's.

Byline: Best of ... by The Register-Guard

While many music lovers will be at this weekend's non-alcoholic Irish festival, we'll be celebrating a different kind of Celtic culture - the 20-ounce variety, if you know what we mean.

Call us old-fashioned lushes or potvaliant know-it-alls (look it up), but we believe St. Paddy's Day is best celebrated with a 39- to 45-degree Guinness, properly poured in an imperial pint glass and lovingly delivered with a shamrock on top.

It used to be you had to hunt for Guinness, but the malty, caramel-y black nectar of the Irish gods has gone main- stream. We counted well over 50 local establishments that serve the stuff on draught, and that was just on our first night of bar-hopping.

Now that everyone from Luckey's to the Lucky Noodle serves Guinness, the main variable is the "pour," a two-step process that is not terribly difficult to pull off, but that we found to be increasingly rare.

The Lucky Noodle and the Horsehead Bar did the job well, taking time to let three-fourths of the pint settle before topping it off with a creamy, half-inch head (`building" the beer, as the Guinness nuts say), but the Blarney Stone, the Cooler and Mulligan's failed the test, pouring their Guinni with all the care of a waitress refilling water glasses (`demolishing" the beer, you could call it).

Now there are those who say the idea of the immaculate pour is just a fable, that Guinness is Guinness and beer is not worth worrying so much about. To that we say, blarney! The proof really is in the pour.

And if you still don't believe us, head (no pun intended) to our favorite pint purveyor, New Max's Tavern, order a tall Guinness and then sit back and wait awhile.

Five, maybe 10, minutes later you'll be rewarded with a perfectly built liquid bouquet of black loveliness. The temperature is just right, the dingy ambiance is perfect and, if you look out the window at the crappy weather, you can almost imagine you're in the old country.

Even though Max's is not an Irish pub per se, it offers a better pour than any of the other watering holes with Irish names or shamrocks on the restroom doors. And based on the way these other so-called Irish bars served their stouts, it's fair to say Max's is the closest thing we have to an authentic Dublin public house.

With all the Irish music lovers in town, we still don't know why Eugene doesn't have an Irish pub on every corner. But until that glorious day arrives, we're happy to park ourselves on a wobbly bar stool at Max's.

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BEST PINT O' GUINNESS

New Max's Tavern

Where: 550 E. 13th Ave.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily

Information: 349-8986

CAPTION(S):

Molly McKeown finishes the critical second pour on a pint of Guinness stout at New Max's Tavern.