The theme that Port Brewing/Lost Abbey brewer Tomme Arthur has chosen for this month’s edition of The Session, our beer blogging Friday, is beer and music, which frankly makes me wonder if we’re ever going to return to tasting by style. (For the record, four of the last five Sessions had no specific style specified beyond such vague ideas as locality and atmosphere.) Still, I am a beer blogger and this is the mandate provided, so let’s have at it.
I know from speaking with them and visiting their breweries that, for many brewers, perhaps most in the craft brewing field, music is a big part of their working lives. I’ve seen everything from battered boom boxes tuned to the local “classic rock” station to jazz jam sessions by brew kettle. As such, there is no question that music has an effect on the beers we love to drink.
(Also from experience, I know that certain illegal or illicit combustibles have an impact on the creation of both beer and music, but that’s an entirely different matter, and hopefully one that won’t be explored in a future edition of The Session.)
I’m the same way. While I do spent chunks of my time traipsing around the world in search of great drink and food, the lion’s share of my work life is spent in a room measuring roughly three metres square, typing away on a keyboard and listening to music. Tastings, too, are usually done to music.
So, does the music I listen to affect my ability to taste and write? Perhaps. It unquestionably affects my mood – something like, say, Motorhead contributing to a much different mindset than the Compay Segundo currently playing on the stereo – so it’s hard to imagine that there’s not some slight effect at play here. Not enough to turn a poor or mediocre beer into a good one, for sure, but even though I take great pains to ground myself and filter out as much as possible outside stimuli before I begin tasting, it is possible, perhaps even probable, that calming music might better serve the assessment of a malty monster of a brew in the same manner as aggressive punk could vaguely influence the sampling of a brawny American IPA.
The answer, then, would seem to be the elimination of music when tasting, but that in itself would have an influence, I think. In the absence of sounds I choose, I would instead hear the traffic racing by below my window, the wind, perhaps, if it were strong, music from above or below – I live in a condo – or even voices raised in joy or anger at streetside. Beyond exerting merely mild influence, any of these could increase stress levels – I find the traffic and honking at rush hour, for example, more than just slightly stress-inducing – and so would have a far greater impact upon my tasting than would music alone.
And besides, when drinking beer in the real world, outside influences and distractions are everywhere – conversations ongoing, music in the background or foreground, the general roar that provides the aural backdrop to any busy bar or restaurant, even the aforementioned traffic noise, if you’re near a window or on a patio near a busy street. Thus, whatever the scientific appeal of “tasting in a bubble,” as it were, such a practice would hardly have any relation to real life beer drinking situations.
Music, I must conclude, therefore has a significant effect on the beers you and I drink. It influences the brewer while he or she is creating them – not hard to imagine a creative brewer jazzed on cranked up Angry Samoans adding a little something extra to a new brew because it seemed at the time like a bold improvement – and it at least slightly influences the reviews you read of them here and elsewhere, even if only by its absence. And it definitely influences the way you perceive them in most public settings.
As for the restful Cuban ballads I listen to now, I suspect that a chilled bock might serve them well, but since it’s still first thing in the morning and my coffee is not yet done, I’ll have to leave that pairing at the conjecture stage. On a more practical level, I have the sneaking suspicion that the combination of Ace of Spades and American IPA resides in my future today.
