THE BLURB
Your brain is lying to you. You have more than five senses and they don’t work the way we have always been taught to think they do.
Award-winning beer writer Pete Brown started pairing his favourite beers and songs as a joke, then discovered that scientists at Oxford University were doing something very similar, and taking it really seriously.
Combining cutting-edge neuroscience, storytelling, humour, music fandom and (obviously) beer tasting notes, this groundbreaking book is the result of years of pairing beer and music at events that pull crowds of up to a thousand at music festivals.
“Side One” is a deep dive into the very latest learning about how we really taste and hear. Side Two lines up 45 pairings of great songs and wonderful beers across many genres and styles, with QR codes linking you to the tunes.
So grab a beer, open your ears and your mind, and dive in. You’ll never think about beer or music the same way again.
BEHIND THE BLURB
Pairing beer with music? I know it sounds like a joke. To be fair, it started off as one. And then, I met Professor Charles Spence.
I started pairing beer with music as a good-natured piss-take of beer and food matching, and as a way of combing my two great passions. Then I found out that what I was do was very close to real, serious experiments that Spence and his colleeagues were conducting at Oxford University and other academic institutions around the world.
Modern neuroscience is in its infancy. Here, in the third decade of the 21st century, we know more about the birth of the universe than we do about how our brains interpret information from our mouth, nose and ears. Of course, pure academia can be a little dry – as Charles Spence told me when I veered too far towards it. So I went broader. Over my entire writing career, the one thing that unites everything I do is that I try to take complex ideas and important but dry information and turn them into something readable and interesting. In some ways, this was my biggest challenge yet. But I’ve been doing the events for nearly fifteen years now. I wanted a document of them. Now, finally, here it is.
PRODUCT INFORMATION
- Publisher: Campaign for Real Ale
- Publication date: 12 Jun. 2025
- Print length: 224 pages
- ISBN-10: 1852493968
- ISBN-13: 978-1852493967