Orange

Orange: such an easy and lazy term to be handed over onto paper or the adjudicator when it comes to classifying the colour of beer. This is dark orange, this is light orange, this is bruised orange; or you might want to suggest that this is orange that has become detached from the very idea of orange (or maybe you’re just colour blind by now). I recall the saffron-yellow-verging-on-orange robes of the Hari Krishna types who used to thread their way along Oxford Street, banging their drums, selling their cassettes, offering free food to those who wanted it; this was a vivid orange, an orange, allied to my understanding of what the HK types tried to sell, seemingly wanting to be seen as spiritual, sacred, clean and pure. Didn’t work though, it just looked gaudy, peculiar and not to be taken seriously. 

So where does orange stand when I classify the colour of a beer? The long, wasp-waisted glass that stands next to me as I write is full of a beer I would suggest is orange in colour, but a dark, battered, bruised, tanned, autumnal kind of orange; an orange that has been around, Iggy Pop perhaps, leathery and lined, doing somersaults on the stage when Ron and the rest of the Stooges grind out the riffs and make the noise. And then it leads me to think: can you drink a colour? Can I drink orange and what would I expect when I drink a beer that is this battered and bruised shade of orange? The rich sweep of sweetness, the child-play of citrus, the haunted castle of Christmas, the recoil on the tongue and the slight rictus that tartness takes to the mouth. Kia-Orange, Fanta, Outspan; I write out their names for better or worse and think of how with these names (or brands if you prefer) orange is a terrible beauty born, a sweetness, a cheat, a fleet-footed villain of instant gifts, those GIFs that gift thumbs-up to those who need that gift of assurance. But then I return to the beer and un-bewildered by the orange I switch to the smoothness that the beer bestows on my tongue, a smoothness that is — yes — spiked with a citrus shadow reminiscent of orange, adjoined to a crispness allied to malt, and a long dry finish that suggests a con-trail spreading across the blue sky on a long hot summer’s afternoon. Can I drink orange? I suspect I can.