OnTap Magazine

26 | Spring 2025 | ontapmag.co.za BEER AND MUSIC PAIRING FEATURE Can music change the flavour of beer? Pete Brown takes an in depth look at the phenomenon. D id you know you can change the flavour of beer by changing the music you play while drinking it? I know it sounds like a joke. I intended it as a joke the first time I said this, fifteen years ago. In 2010, beer blogging was at its zenith. Craft beer was starting to explode in the UK, and people had finally stopped laughing at me when I told them I wrote about beer for a living. As part of this happy, hoppy renaissance, books and events promoting the idea of pairing beer with food were everywhere. This was part of a broader push to try and persuade people, for better or worse, that you could take beer just as seriously as wine. Predictably, wine snobs laughed at the idea. But even many ardent beer drink- ers dismissed it, saying beer couldn’t possi- bly work as a pairing for food. If you think about it, this is ridiculous: every single cuisine and menu ever devel- oped by humankind is based on one simple principle: that some flavours go together better on the palate than others. How could the many flavours in beer somehow be ex- empt from this otherwise universal rule? At the time, I thought this resistance per- haps had more 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. I started plugging my iPhone into a speaker and forcing my taste on beer and white boy eighties indie music on ev- eryone else at sparsely attended events. But the world is a strange and wonderful place. And it turns out there’s an entire de- partment at Oxford University exploring the different ways our senses overlap and inter- fere with each other, sometimes changing our perception of what we’re seeing, hear- ing, tasting or smelling. Professor Charles Spence, the head of this department, began to educate me. Gradually, my events got better. I included classical, rock, country, grime, and even gave a nod in the general direction of jazz. I included experiments whose results turned