Fifteen years in the making, despite a few hiccups, I’ve finally managed to do the book of my beer and music pairing event!
It’s finally here!
In 2010 I started pairing beer with music as a joke. My wife, Liz, had a spare slot at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, which she founded and runs. At the time, everyone was talking about beer and food pairing. Predictably, wine snobs laughed at the idea. But even many ardent beer drinkers dismissed it, saying beer couldn’t possibly work as a pairing for food.
I thought this resistance had something to do with snobbery: both direct, and inverted. Wine snobs will always perceive beer as inferior. But also, perhaps for longtime beer lovers, pairing beer with food just seemed too pretentious? Maybe it smacked of taking beer too seriously? I thought: You think pairing beer and food is pretentious? Hold my beer – I’ll show you pretentious. And so, I stood in front of about thirty people with my iPhone plugged into a speaker, and made them listen to New Order and the Pixies while they drank beer.
Two years later, I met Charles Spence, Professor of Experimental Psychology and Head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, who informed me that what I was doing was similar to real, serious experiments he and others were conducting around the world. Our senses mingle and overlap, helping each other out in ways we’re not always aware of. What you see influences what you (think you) taste. And so does what you hear.
I started running some experiments during my event and collecting data. I learned that I could change the flavour of beer by changing the music that was playing. I evolved my talk into a full-on multimedia show, incorporating neuroscience, video, tutored tasting, and over three jokes. Since 2014, I’ve done the show at the Green Man Festival in South Wales. This is, by some distance, the biggest live event I do, regularly playing to around 1200 people.
Every year, people ask me when the book is coming out. Now, CAMRA Books have done what no one else would do and allowed me to write it!
“Side One” takes an in-depth look at how we perceive flavour, how we perceive music, and how “confounding factors” such as context, environment, memory and other sensory stimulus affect our perceptions.
“Side Two” consists of 45 pairings that represent a considerable expansion from my 80s white boy indie roots, taking in pop, rock, country, hip hop, classical, opera, even jazz.
Here’s a sample pairing – one of the first I ever did:
If you want a copy, the best place to buy it is CAMRA Books, but it’s also available from Waterstones, Amazon and some bookshops. (If you’re a bookshop and you want to stock it, there has been a delay in getting it to wholesalers, but it’s now in stock at MDL and Gardners, even though the latter still says it’s not available – that should be sorted any time now.)
Please check out my events page for the live show – there are more to be added here. Let me know if you want to host one! Green Man 2025 is just weeks away, and this year will be the official launch party of the book, with an audience abut half of whom come to the show every year. With several of the bands playing over the weekend actually featuring in the book, we’re going to blow the roof off the spoken word tent!
Please buy my book. You’ll love it.
