Breaking hearts

It’s playing in the background, ‘never gonna break my heart again’, what Coward called the romance of cheap music, and I ponder on the beer in front of me, Zundert Trappist, and I wonder if a beer can break your heart, or for that matter can a brewery break your heart, or is the hurt that some of us feel when a beer or a brewery vanishes similar to the two minute emotions of a song — transitory and enduring only as long as the song echoes in our thoughts?

And as I drink I think back to the morning as my coach pulled into Victoria at 6am and I saw a guy walking up the road, in full early 60s rockabilly (or was it greaser?) regalia — peaked hat, leather jacket with badges and slogans written on it, including one for the Pirates (Johnny Kidd and the Pirates I think), old school bike boots with white socks rolled up at top, jeans tucked in, denim new and durable, an outfit that was popular when the Beatles drank Mackeson, London Pride had an ad campaign based on an LP and Albert Seaton swigged his body weight in beer on a Saturday night and fell down the stairs in his local pub…

And the point is that this man was both celebrating and mourning a past he would never know, but things have moved on and those who want to drink the beers they drank in the past will find that they too have moved on, meanwhile the Trappist beer is ok, sugary and blanket-like in its smoothness, but I feel like I’m back in that coach watching the rockabilly guy, reliving a beer that never knew its past but is content to stride along the pavement, unafraid of what contemporary time thinks, undaunted in the pomp and passion of asking the past if it can answer the phone or come to the door or unfurl its flag and never break your heart again.

…like a massive ant army on the march

With the sound of a massive ant army on the march, the grain for the first mash of the day at Burning Sky travels along the tube until it reaches the safety of the mash tun — as Shakespeare might have written if he’d been interested in covering the beer scene of his time, this island of brewing is full of noises, strange sounds and sweet melodies. The clanging of metal, the wheezy breathing of the boiler, the shouts of the brewer and now this a massive ant army on the march .

Dissonance

Dissonance. It sometimes works in music. Chords bumping into each; a rhythmic disturbance that somehow works; slow, fast, slow, fast, C# Minor and G Major played at the same time perhaps, though given that one chord contains C and the other C# it might be stretching things a bit too far. However, I’m also thinking of John Coltrane, whose work I don’t know much beyond a Love Supreme, but I remember enjoying it years ago. The Jesus & Mary Chain could do a nice riff in dissonance as well — the Beach Boys (or the Monkees) filtered through Lou Reed Metal Machine Music perhaps? Even in Elgar’s transcription of JS Bach’s Fantasia in C minor there’s a nice line in creative dissonance when it seems like the orchestra is starting to slow down and fall apart but something happens to keep it all together and the music moves to new heights of beauty.

And what this has to do with beer? The other night I opened the bottle of Meantime’s Cali-Belgian IPA that I had been sent. Described as a golden Californian-style IPA given a Belgian twist, I found it an intriguingly dissonant beer with the Belgian yeast giving it a bright and spicy character, while the IPA side of things brought forward a concentration of grapefruit, orange peel and fresh mango, though it wasn’t an easy-going fruitiness. It was a fascinating beer and one that really deserved to have some time spent with it. It made me think and with each sip I loved the beer more. And as I drank it I thought that if Californian-style IPA was rock, then Cali-Belgian IPA was most definitely jazz and that is when I started thinking about dissonance.

There’s a wildness, a flutter of different harmonies, an itch developed to explore more, a feeling that such a beer is not an easy conquest, but something to be contemplated, not instantly understood. And it was then that I thought about jazz, a form of music that I’ve never been too fond of though what I’ve heard from Coltrane and Miles Davis has always intrigued me. That’s the same thing with this beer — it intrigues me, it makes me think and best of all it revives what I sometimes worry is a palate being jaded by too many IPAs, that everyone and their mother nowadays makes. I loved it but if you want some best be quick as it’s part of the Brewers’ Collection, a monthly beer from Meantime. Next time around there’s an Imperial Pilsner , which I really hope I can try. That won’t be dissonant — contrapuntal perhaps?