OnTap Magazine

ontapmag.co.za | Spring 2025 | 27 out to be similar to those being conducted by real scientists. I wrote over two original jokes. Now, I’ve collected everything I’ve learned into a book: Tasting Notes: The Art and Science of Pairing Beer with Music, published in the UK by CAMRA Books. IT'S BEEN A FASCINATING JOURNEY. The first experiments in pairing drinks with music were done by a Danish academic in 1968. He found that Carlsberg Pilsner had a different sonic pitch to Carlsberg Elephant Beer. Since then, there have been hundreds of experiments exploring the relationship between what we hear and what we taste. But almost all of them have used wine and classic music. I guess they think that makes it seem more “serious” than beer with pop and rock music. You can use colour to make something “taste” sweeter, so you can reduce sug- ar without impacting how much we enjoy sweet foods. You can change perception of how nice a meal is by making the cutlery heavier. OR YOU COULD JUST MAKE GREAT TASTING BEERS TASTE EVEN BETTER. You might think you know how taste works. Youmight even have been to a tutored tast- ing, or judged a beer competition. All that sniffing and swirling releasing volatile hop compounds and detecting notes of floral and citrus. Or you might think all that is pretentious nonsense, which shouldn’t have anything to do with enjoying a decent pint. We’re funny about flavour. We’re not comfortable talking about it, and when we do, we don’t have enough words for it. This is because ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato were snobs. There’s a hierarchy of the senses that hasn’t changed for thousands of years. Sight and hearing are the “noble senses.” They’re how we appreciate art and music, understanding ideas about religion and philosophy. Touch, taste and smell are the “lower order sens- es,” about bodily functions and sensual appetites. Philosophers don’t like to dwell on our earthy, animal nature, so these have been relatively ignored. Even now, in all the recent multi-sensory research, the way sight and sound influence each other has had far more research devoted to it than how we taste. Having said that, the way we hear re- mains amystery. We understand how sound is generated. We understand how the ear turns soundwaves into electronic signals that it sends to the brain. But we’re utter- ly clueless as to how the brain turns those signals into a sense of how loud music is, where it’s coming from, what instrument is playing, what the tune is, whether it’s in tune, and so on. We know more about how the universe was born than how our senses work. So, while it may sound unlikely that taste and sound overlap and influence each other, there’s no one on the planet who can defi- nitely prove that they do not. The first part of the book – “Side One” – looks at the very latest science. It takes a deep dive into how we taste, how we hear, and looks at how things like context (why does that pint taste so much better on hol- iday than it does at home?) and personal history (why can’t you face that drink you got wasted on and threw up when you were eighteen?) It goes on to demonstrate new research that shows the relationships be- tween, for example, different basic tastes