Category: Beer and Music

| Beer, Beer and Music, Beer Books, Beer Festivals, Beer tasting, CAMRA, Tasting Notes, Writing

Say hello to “Tasting Notes: The Art and Science of Pairing Beer and Music.”

I’ve got a new book coming out. Oh, come on, don’t be like that. It’s been three long years since the last one.

If you’re writing a book, the best possible reason to write it it that no one else has written anything like it yet. Now, one possible reason no one has written it yet is that no one wants to read it. Writing a book that no one else has written, that people feel they need to read – well, that’s what gets me up in the morning, and tears me away from playing Warhammer: Total War in the afternoon.

My new book, Tasting Notes, will be published by CAMRA publishing in May, possibly June.

It certainly ticks the first box. I’m not the only person exploring the relationship between beer and music these days. But I’ve been doing it in regular live events for fifteen years now. It started off as a joke. Then I met an Oxford Professor who told me it was actually serious. When I got the joke side and the serious side in the right balance, the events became really popular. Every year for the past decade, it has packed out the 1000-seat spoken word tent at the Green Man Festival in South Wales.

When I’m doing signings afterwards, people queue up to ask me when the book is coming out. Well, now we know!

It splits into two parts – two sides of a record, if you will – the theory and the practice.

Side One – the theory – covers:

  • How we really taste and perceive flavour, why that’s a lot more complicated and mysterious than perhaps you thought it was, and why it’s so important to us. Starting with why its Aristotle’s fault that when most people try to describe the flavour of beer, the best thing can so is, “It tastes like beer.”
  • How we really hear and perceive music, and why that’s a lot more complicated and mysterious than perhaps you thought it was, and why it’s so important to us. I give a definitive, simple answer to the great philosophical question: “If a tree falls in a forest, and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” I introduce you to the EXTERNAL AUDITORY MEATUS, wait patiently whole you make a joke about having seen them support Nine Inch Nails back in the day, and then go on to show how scientists understand less about how we hear music than they do about the birth of the universe.
  • How context, culture, occasion, mood, memory, glassware, that person you had a crush on when you were fourteen and what you had for breakfast all impact what you think you can taste and hear. Specifically, why that beer you loved on holiday tasted so shit when you brought some back home.
  • Introducing the sexy field of crossmodal correspondence. Yeah! No, come back – this is the most fascinating bit. It’s a look at recent research that proves – yes, proves – that on top of all the contextual stuff, our brains have formed deep-seated relationships between what we taste and what we hear, and how changing background music can alter the flavour of your beer. Why low, deep bass sounds pair with malty flavours, and high, melodic, harmonious instruments go with the grassy, citrus and tropical flavours of hops. Because they do, don’t they? You already knew that they did, now you think about it.
  • Why beer and music have always enjoyed an intimate relationship, and how they mean and perform similar functions for us if we like them both. Includes a timeline which shows that post-punk/alternative/indie music is EXACTLY THE SAME AS CRAFT BEER. But goes way beyond both indie and craft.

Side Two – the practice – starts with an overview of the different ways you can pair beers and songs/pieces of music, based on what we’ve learned on Side One. Then, it has forty to fifty pairings (tbc) that I’ve put together. Half of these have worked at events over the years, half are new for the book, based on the extra research I’ve done for it. When I started this, I was selfishly basing it on my own musical tastes. At one event a few years ago, someone asked, “Pete, have you ever heard any music from the 21st century?” Since then I’ve since expanded significantly. It’s not (just) about what I like. It’s about what demonstrates the effect of a good pairing. I haven’t used any songs I don’t actually like (sorry, fans of Queen, Abba, Ed Sheeran) but I’ve incorporated folk, jazz, country, classical, blues, R&B, classic pop, rock ‘n’ roll, ambient, one song that Wikipedia claims belongs to ` genre knowns as “sophistipop,” and music that defies having a label attached to it beyond a basic definition of “organised noise.” The playlist starts with Sugababes – longtime favourites from previous books such as Shakespeare’s Local – and ends with Underworld. From Claude Debussy to Miles Davis, Hendrix to Hawley, the Shadows to The The, Gaga to the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, every track is matched with a beer that means something, that has its own story to tell. We explore the importance of the beer, the importance of the song, and then explain why they were made for each other and how they work together.

I’ll post more details and give a few sneak previews once I’ve actually finished writing the bastard. The deadline has been and gone. I’m also doing loads of events to promote it. starting next week at CAMRA’s winter ales festival in Rotherham. I’m on at 6pm on Friday 14th February. Nothing special happening that night is there?

Much more to come…

| Beer, Beer and Music, Craft Beer

Easter Quiz: Craft Beer or Eighties Indie band?

What if we run out of names?

Could this be the lead singer of Wu Gang Chops the Tree?

 

There’s a common joke in my circle of friends, and I last heard it last night: when someone says or writes a phrase that sounds unusually poetic, unusual or pretentious – I think last night’s was something like “Whirpool volatile preservation” – you can raise a knowing titter by saying something along the lines of “I prefer their earlier stuff” or “Didn’t they headline Friday in the John Peel Tent at Glastonbury in 1997?” It’s not the funniest joke ever, but it always makes me laugh.

Thinking about how and why this works, I realised that the analogy between beer and music is always finding new levels to operate on, and one of them is in naming. “Where do they get those names from?” was a common refrain on John Peel’s radio show in my youth, and it’s a phrase I’m regularly hearing again now as craft brewers struggle to come up with something that sets their latest new launch apart.

So I decided to create a quick quiz. Here are ten names. Some of  them are from long-forgotten eighties Indie bands (or perhaps not that forgotten – some of them are still going.). The others are from recent craft brews. Can you tell which is which? See how many you can get right!

  1. 1. I, Ludicrous

2. Beard of Zeus

3. Bosko

4. Eyeless in Gaza

5. Brood in Obscurity

6. Quiet Release

7. Front 242

8. Strange Advance

9. Age of Chance

10. Whiplash Bone Machine

No cheating – scroll down for answers below!

 

 

I’ll be back at the Green Man Festival in August doing my beer and music matching show, where I pair a selection of the 70-odd beers in the main bar tent with the bands playing the festival. Tickets for the festival are on sale now. It’s like Glastonbury used to be before it got huge. I haven’t yet seen the beer list, but am pretty certain Public Service Broadcasting, Anna Calvi, Fleet Foxes and Kelly Lee Owens will all be jostling to get on my playlist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. 1. Band

2. Beer

3. Beer

4. Band

5. Beer

6. Beer

7. Band

8. Band

9. Band

10. Beer