and agreed to pay an additional £45 annually for 9,000 years. One major conflict that dominated Guinness's early brewery career involved the terms of his lease as they related to water usage. The brewery's first owner, Giles Mee, had signed two separate leases with the Dublin Corporation: one for the property and one for the use of water. When the brewery fell into disuse in 1750, the water lease was forgotten. By 1773, the Corporation had become angry with Guinness, claiming that his brewery was using more water than was afforded by his lease, while Guinness rebutted that the terms of the lease afforded him water "free of tax or pipe money". In April 1775, the corporation, who discovered that Guinness had made a number of alterations to his pipe system in order to draw more water onto his property, elected to physically cut off his supply. Guinness, in return, confronted the corporation with a pickaxe and threatened to dig his own channel. The properties agreed to settle the matter in court, and in 1785, Guinness agreed to lease his water from the City of Dublin for an annual charge of £10. While he was immediately popular in Dublin, Guinness did not rise to immediate dominance among regional brewers. Tax information from 1766 indicates that he was still far outpaced by a number of rival brewers such as Taylor, Thwaites, and Phepoe. As a whole, the Dublin brewers were less economically successful than English brewers, whose imported porter was the dominant drink in the city. Guinness began tentatively adding porter to his ale-heavy brewery in 1778, and by 1783, it dominated his marketing, with Guinness telling a parliamentary committee, "a porter buys none but the best, as none else will answer". A memoranda book that Guinness kept in 1796 shows that porter production at the St. James's Gate brewery was by that time five times larger than his ale output. On 22 April 1799, Guinness formally brewed his last ale, forthwith declaring St. James's Gate a "porter brewery". Although he limited his brewery to dark beer, Guinness did experiment with different forms of porter. His concept of a "West India Porter", which utilised a greater hops and alcohol content to survive long overseas travel to the Caribbean, later became the basis for Guinness Foreign Extra Stout. As a prominent figure within the Dublin brewery scene, as well as a member