The Secret Ingredient in Your Drink? The Soundtrack.
Beyond great drinks and a cool vibe, fans of early aughts dance music had another reason to head to D.C.’s Press Club this summer: a tasting menu of cocktails inspired by Daft Punk’s 2001 classic disco-funk album “Discovery.”
Both music and drinks bring customers into bars, Press Club co-founder Will Patton says, and creative bartenders can work with both.
“The idea, essentially, is to find parallels between the song and the cocktail,” he says. “You’re tying two aspects of the experience together, ideally harmoniously.”
That can mean finding flavors for drinks that match themes or moods from the album, or teasing out a more literal connection. Like drinks, many of which are simply variations on earlier recipes, modern music often uses samples or borrows hooks and rhythms from earlier songs. Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” owes a big debt to “Cola Bottle Baby,” a 1979 track from funk legend Edwin Birdsong. As a savvy homage to the original, Press Club serves its Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger cocktail — a blend of Lost Irish whiskey and Banyuls dessert wine, flavored with miso and Angostura phosphate — in a Cola bottle.
That connection may sound obscure, but the relationship between drinks and sounds is starting to become better understood. In recent years, bartenders, publicans, writers and researchers have started puzzling out the connections between what we drink and what we hear when we drink, from carefully selected soundtracks to room noise and the chimes of glassware as we toast.
One big takeaway: Our perception of any drink is strongly influenced by what we hear.
Music as a Flavor
Most of us would probably agree that a great soundtrack can heighten our enjoyment of a nice drink, and almost everyone can remember a time when bad music ruined what could have been a pleasant drinking experience. Experts like the British beer writer Pete Brown, however, take things even further. For 15 years, Brown has been working on pairing beers and musical tracks at public events, an experience that resulted in a book, “Tasting Notes: The Science and Art of Pairing Beer and Music,” which came out this summer.
“My bold claim is that I can change the flavor of the beer that you’re drinking by changing the soundtrack,” he says. He often tests that assertion at scale, matching music and beer for crowds as big as 1,200 at festivals and events around the U.K. “It really does work,” he says.
Before Brown became a beer obsessive, he was into music of all kinds, and his new book arrives with a Spotify playlist ranging from 17th-century opera to tracks by the Beach Boys and This Mortal Coil, as well as the 44 beers and one cider that he recommends pairing with them.
Some attendees at his events start out skeptical. But a simple question about pitch often helps guests grasp how their impressions of taste and aroma are connected to music.
“Sometimes the music will make the beer taste more sour. But if you get the balance right, it actually takes the sourness away. The music reduces the sourness and the beer becomes fruity.”
“As soon as you say to an audience, ‘Is lemon high-pitched or low-pitched?’ everyone says, ‘It’s high-pitched,’” he says. “And to that moment, you’ve never thought that flavor has musical pitch.”
If citrus is a high note for many drinkers, at the other end of the scale are “earthier” flavors like chocolate, vanilla, and coffee, which often show up in imperial stouts and other dark beer styles. At the recent Green Man Festival in Wales, Brown paired beers with artists performing at the festival, suggesting an imperial stout for a set by musician John Grant, known for his song “GMF.”
“I think his voice is like liquid chocolate anyway,” he says. “When you use low-pitched music to bring out those deep flavors, it really does enhance them.”
Brown discovered many of his favorite combinations by accident, and he likes to say that his whole idea of pairing beer with music originally started as a joke intended to highlight bias against beer — from both the wine world and beer lovers — in fancy food-and-drink pairings.
“I said, ‘If you want to see pretentious, I’ll show you pretentious,’” he recalls.
Later, during one of Brown’s events at the Edinburgh Science Festival, Charles Spence, the author of “Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating,” told Brown that his team at Oxford University was already researching the same thing.
“I unwittingly stumbled across it,” he says. “It was very similar to the first experiments that they were doing at the time.”
Some of Brown’s accidental discoveries included finding connections between acidic beers and dissonance or atonality. Some modern jazz records and 1990s techno and rave tracks can make a slightly tart beer taste more sour — up to a point. In other cases, that kind of pairing can work almost the same way noise-cancelling software does, using wave interference.
“Sometimes the music will make the beer taste more sour,” he says. “But if you get the balance right, it actually takes the sourness away. The music reduces the sourness and the beer becomes fruity.”
At one event, he says, an attendee was perplexed by the change he noticed in two beers, Chimay Blue and Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier. Both are widely known and considered the pinnacles of their respective styles.
“This guy came up to me afterwards and said, ‘How did you get the beers to change? How did you get the flavors to change?’” he says. The difference: The soundtrack had switched from Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” to “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix.
Sound From the Glass
Music that pairs with or inspires a drink recipe is one way sound can influence what we taste and smell. But sound can also come out of the glass itself. Mandy Naglich, author of “How to Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life,” points out that an edible garnish can influence how we perceive a drink, especially if it hits the right notes.
“As humans, when we hear a crunch, we think that what we’re eating is more healthy, because that crunch means that cell walls are very healthy — they’re full of nutrients,” she says. “So if you see a garnish and you think it will crunch and then it has that nice, loud, satisfying crunch, that’s going to be very stimulating to us.”
Carbonation provides another auditory cue that can affect our perception, especially when it comes to sparkling wines.
“If you have a nicely shaped glass, something like a Champagne tulip that really funnels that sound to your ears as you’re drinking, you’re going to find that to feel more carbonated,” Naglich says. “It’s really satisfying when you have that nice, loud carbonation.”
Science, in the form of anatomy, helps explain how sound can affect taste. The ninth cranial nerve, or glossopharyngeal nerve, includes branches from both the tongue and the ear, and those impressions reach the brain through the chorda tympani.
“Our taste signals literally travel through our ears from the back of our tongue,” Naglich says. Since both messages are coming down the same road, as it were, studies have proven that high noise levels reduce taste perception of both sweetness and saltiness. “In a loud environment, you’re tasting less, period. It’s going to dull your sense of taste.”
“If we have a lot of dates, we will play things a little bit slower, so things can get a little cozy. We definitely see more of the sipping cocktails around that time, especially our Manhattan variations, our Old Fashioned variations.”
With that in mind, bar owners can work with sound — or at least make sure that sound isn’t working against them. Adding soft surfaces, such as to the underside of tables, can reduce noisy echoes and bring down overall decibel levels. That alone can improve the guest experience.
“I think the first thing is just keeping sounds from bouncing around, so it doesn’t feel like a super-loud room,” Naglich says. “Everyone should not hear the scratch when you pull out a chair.”
After that, a well-chosen soundtrack can do a lot for the atmosphere. Obscure music that most guests won’t recognize definitely creates a certain kind of vibe, but occasionally throwing in songs with wider appeal can help create a more inclusive feeling.
“There’s a saying that like one in every five songs should be a nostalgic, recognizable song, so everyone kind of comes together as a group,” she says. “And then it dives back into things that maybe are only recognizable to a niche group of people.”
How Music Enhances Hospitality
At Press Club, co-founder Devin Kennedy says that music can have an impact on not just what people drink, but how they drink it. During service, his team often changes the music to fit the mood. In turn, guests sometimes change their orders.
“If we have a lot of dates, we will play things a little bit slower, so things can get a little cozy,” he says. “We definitely see more of the sipping cocktails around that time, especially our Manhattan variations, our Old Fashioned variations, things that take a little bit longer to drink and to savor.”
By contrast, when the music and drink choices switch in prime time, the cause-and-effect relationship gets a little murky.
“In the peak parts of the night, when we get bigger groups, we’ll put on a little bit more disco,” Kennedy says. “We see people ordering more bright, refreshing drinks, like our sours, our tall drinks, things that can be consumed very quickly while talking.”
Brown notes that matching music and drinks is more of an art than a science, and it’s likely to be culturally relative: Drinkers who didn’t grow up hearing the Western musical scale probably won’t get the same impact from music based on it. To a large degree, it’s up to bartenders and servers to figure out what really works.
For Kennedy, that’s all part of the big picture of hospitality.
“If you come into a place and you’re not having a great time, nothing’s going to taste great,” he says. “But if you’re having a great time and the music’s good, it’s going to taste like the best Margarita you ever had. Everything’s going to be enhanced.”
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