Would you pair Proper Job with New Order’s ‘Temptation’? What beer would you drink with Richard Hawley’s ‘Open Up Your Door’ or Tim Buckley’s ‘Buzzin’ Fly’? Pete Brown explores the art and science of pairing beer and music. Did 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 it, fifteen years ago. But the world is a strange and wonderful place. And it turns out there’s an entire department at Oxford University exploring the different ways our senses overlap and interfere with each other, sometimes changing our perception of what we’re seeing, hearing, tasting or smelling.

You can use colour to make something ‘taste’ sweeter, so you can reduce sugar without impacting how much we enjoy sweet foods. You can change the perception of how nice a meal is by making the cutlery heavier. Or you can make great-tasting beers taste even better.

I’ve been doing live events pairing beers with songs for fifteen years. Now, I’ve collected everything I’ve learned into a book: Tasting Notes: The Art and Science of Pairing Beer with Music, published by CAMRA Books.

We’re funny about flavour. We’re not comfortable talking about it, and when we do, we don’t have enough words for it. We know more about how the universe was born than how our senses work. So, how can we say definitively that they don’t overlap and influence each other?

The first part of the book – ‘Side One’ – looks at the very latest science and demonstrates the relationships between, for example, different basic tastes – sweet, sour, salty, butter – and different musical styles.

‘Side Two’ applies this learning. Across 45 pairings, including pop, rock, punk, post-rock, ambient, classical, country, folk, hip hop, brass, grime, trance and opera, Tasting Notes shows that the flavours of lager, pale ale, stout, IPA, mild, geuze, porter, stout and Trappist ales can be enhanced or even altered by the music you hear when drinking them. There’s a playlist on Spotify, so you can grab a beer and experiment for yourself.

There are different ways to make these pairings work. The easiest is just by situation and context – if you’ve ever made a playlist for gym, and a different one for, say, background dinner music or music to work to, then you’re already playing with how different music suits and even enhances different occasions. Beer does something similar – you choose a different pint on a hot summer’s day than you would on St Patrick’s Day, not just because they taste different, but also because they help to create the right mood.

There’s pairing by intuition too. Neil Young’s ‘Harvest Moon’ goes with a wheat beer such as Hoegaarden simply because they feel right together. I can only make educated guesses as to why.

Then things get more interesting. Think about musical pitch. Is the flavour of lemon high-pitched or low-pitched? What about dark chocolate? If you said citrus was high-pitched and chocolate low, then you said the same as 99 per cent of people to whom I’ve asked that question. Tempo: is lemon fast or slow? We all recognise these relationships when they’re pointed out, even if we’ve never thought of them before.

But different music changing the flavour of beer? How does that work? Well… we don’t know. But it does. Grab yourself a well-made IPA, such as Proper Job. A punchy beer, which has some sweet, fruity flavours from the hops, and an assertive bitterness at the end. Drink the beer listening to ‘Be My Baby’ by the Ronettes, and then drink it again with Billie Eilish’s theme tune to the last Bond film, ‘No Time To Die’. One of these tunes will make the beer taste sweeter. The other will make it taste more bitter. Which way round? Well, why not give it a go?

Read more articles from our magazine The Taproom : Perfect Geek: How to get the best beer from PerfectDraft, A postcard from: inside North Carolina's barbecue scene and Beer snacks: how to make the world's best beer food !