Beer and music, music and beer

I used to think beer and music, music and beer was about drinking bucketfuls of Holsten Pils alongside Iggy’s Gimme Danger or contemplating a deep and virtuous barley wine accompanied by Edmund Rubbra’s beautiful Passacaglia and Fugue from his 7th symphony. Otherwise I didn’t pay it much attention.

However, that all changed last week when I was invited to a music and beer matching event hosted by beer writer Pete Brown; it was entitled Why do guitars taste like hops? and about how certain pieces of music can affect the beer you taste. This is something Brown has being pursing for a while, and he has been joined in his research by academic Charles Spence, who is (take deep breath) Professor of Experimental Psychology & University Lecturer, Somerville College Oxford (I did rather blot my copy book when I said to him: Somerville, isn’t that the women’s college?), and Head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory.

So before I think and drink deeply, what else is there to know? Oh we were in a private dining room at Michelin star restaurant Quilon restaurant in Westminster, where Brown paired six beers with five pieces of music.

At the start there was some interesting stuff about how certain pieces of music bring their own mood: the Jaws’ theme is probably the most famous. There was stuff about the complexity of taste, about how there are trillions of aromas and how our brains decode chemical signals, all of which I’m probably not doing enough justice to — but then I got thrown out of Physics O-level and scraped through a Chemistry CSE (aka Certificate for Simple Escalopes).

So on we went — first of all starting with Goose Island 312 and Blue Moon with Neil Young’s Harvest Moon. I’m not a Neil Young fan, I think the only piece of work by him I know is something from 1980, can’t even remember the name, but I do remember that when I was a music journalist he was a big noise with the hipsters. Both the beers for me are moderate but what I did find interesting was that Blue Moon edged it; drunk when the music was playing it seemed to have a fuller flavour than when the music wasn’t playing. The 312 was thin and that is all there is to say about it — even Metallica couldn’t have roused it.

Duvel and the Pixies Debaser — this pairing seemed to bring out the beer’s bitterness, something that I hadn’t noted before (at this stage my notebook has the phrase ‘Status Quo on Ketamine’); it made the beer less elegant, which is a good thing. It made me think of a smelly leather jacket (I used to own one). Again I refer to my notes: ‘the Duvel feels soiled…’ Again a good thing.

Liefmans Cuvée Brut cherry beer and an acid house track from Voodoo Ray, A Guy Called Gerald. I wasn’t sure about this one, but then perhaps I couldn’t overcome my antipathy to the cherry beer, while I recall acid house made me feel I wanted to take on an army, I would have gone for a more aggressive beer, an imperial IPA? But that’s me, I never did do peace and love. But again referring to my notes what I did like was the fact that I was being challenged, I wasn’t a nodding donkey.

Finally we got to try Chimay Blue and Fuller’s Vintage 2011 with Debussy’s Clair de Lune and Jimi Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower. I felt that the Chimay became thinner during the Debussy though the Fuller’s Vintage was like a Tiger tank ripping through the forests when drunk with Hendrix.

And that was that: the evening continued but I was left with a host of thoughts and questions about how this all worked. It is fascinating stuff and thoroughly challenging; also it’s indicative of how some beer writers are trying to work out a different way of articulating what we drink. If you get a chance to see Brown make Duvel feel soiled or Blue Moon taste palatable then I would hasten along. 

My favourite beer books of 2012

Words, food and beer: how a book begins (Marble Arch, Feb 2011)

Been some good books this year, but for me five stand out and here they are in no particular order. I loved Tim Webb and Stephen Beaumont’s gorgeous World Atlas of Beer with the duo’s incisive and elegant styles of writing bringing the beers of the world to sparkling life allied with lush, luxuriant and lively photography. This is the beer book as a backpacker.

Then there was Chris Arnot’s Britain’s Lost Breweries and Beers, an elegiac and yet uplifting social history of those that were once at the centre of their community but have now gone. It might have been a yomp along memory lane but the lacrimosa was absent — some of the beers now vanished, Arnot suggested, might not have been that good. It’s a valuable record — Brian Glover’s The Lost Beers and Breweries of Britain covered a similarly melancholic subject but I have not seen it yet, but knowing how good a writer Brian is I will look for it in the new year.

Then there is Pete Brown’s exceptional Shakespeare’s Local. I did my first serious book review for the Telegraph of it and devoured it in one sitting. Even now I have been listening to Tony Robinson reading extracts from it on Radio 4 and continue to enjoy it. The strength and skill of the book is that Brown brings to life Southwark, seeing it through a beery eye and putting the George at the centre of things. I love it and think it’s his best book yet.

You will probably have a job getting these three books in time for Christmas but not with my final two choices, which are by the same writer and can be downloaded onto your Kindle within minutes. Evan Rail’s Why Beer Matters and In Praise of Hangovers are beer writing taken to a new philosophical plane, beer writing as a matter of musing, personal recollection, philosophical probing all brought together with an erudite and personable writing style. They are essays, elegant in their design, but also robust in the way in which they celebrate beer and its universe. In Praise of Hangovers was a particularly welcome company on a train journey I took from Pilsen to Munich back in September — a crowded carriage, a slight mustiness in the head after the Purkmistr festival the day before, the growing carousing of Oktoberfest-bound travellers, a desire to go home (though it would be another four days before that happened) and a disinclination to have another beer for a while. That essay made me feel much better and I remembered it that evening as I wandered open-mouthed around Oktoberfest’s carnage.

So there you are five great books and I haven’t even mentioned Mitch Steele’s book on IPA and Stan Hieronymus’ For The Love of Hops, which are for 2013.

Hops and Glory

People mill about, chatter rises to the rafters like smoke from a fire; have a beer says someone to someone else; have another says another. White Shield or Sierra Nevada says a nice woman behind the table. On the wall, photos of the sea, ships and brewing following each other with clockwork precision — a lazy drift of snapshots like a punt ambling upstream. Who’s that over there? Oh it’s Neil Morrissey and Richard Fox. I’m pissed says someone from the Publican. I’m not says the Chairman of the British Guild of Beer Writers, but I will be. A pile of books, the brickwork of a life in writing, rise from a table. Hops And Glory: the name of the book. The launch. Back in 2007 beer writer Pete Brown went on a journey with a barrel of beer and I thought him mad, while also admiring the inspiration that motivated such a journey. Beer writing is about journeys, but usually from brewery to brewery, from country to country, cocooned in the company of PRs and fellow writers — not with a bloody great barrel in tow. Yet Pete — by barge, by rail, by cruise ship, by sailing ship, by banana boat — went further than any other beer writer, in more ways than one. Forget about press trips to Polish or Czech breweries, smooth train journeys to welcoming English micros and barmy Belgians or even long winded drives around the hidden breweries of the biére de garde area — I have done them all, but I would never have had the courage or fortitude to do what Pete did. As the people come and go in the confines of the BrewWharf, the question to ask: was it all worth it? Reading the book, reeling at the cost, the logistical nightmares, the emotional toil and trouble, the single minded obsession, the energy and motivation to continue when all seemed lost, I think the answer is yes. Yes, as Molly Bloom said at the end of Ulysses (there I’ve given the ending away), the most positive word in the English language, yes it was worth it. The book is funny — Pete (and I speak as someone who has enjoyed many a drink with him) is a funny man with a fine sense of the absurdities of life; he’s the sort of writer who can make mockery of the moment he fell in the Burton-Rugby canal; is he having a laugh? Of course he is. Alongside the humour there’s also a well-observed sense of poignancy at the decline of the brewing industry in Burton; there’s much new information on the development of IPA and even if the history bits occasionally owe a lot to the John O’Farrell/Stuart Maconie school of historicism (ie historical characters seemingly straight out of the pages of Loaded or Nuts), the fascination that Pete has with the Raj and its roisterers and way that IPA became the drink of choice shines out through these pages. Then there is the sense of tension that ripples through the pages when he is writing about waiting for a replacement cask before boarding the boat that will take him across the Atlantic and up to India for the end of the journey. In an age where I have thought that there is nothing new to be written about beer, Hops And Glory comes along and refreshes the genre (see pages 234-235 for a new take of keg beer), while also managing to shed new light on a beer whose mythology we have taken for granted for too long. So back in the BrewWharf. As the people come and go the question to ask: was it all worth it? One word. Yes.