Red Banshee, Fort Collins Brewery

Today's post is all about synesthesia.  Well, there's a little in here about unsolved mysteries too.  No, wait, it's about beer.  Totally all about beer.  I would never stray from the topic.  I came across an article in the Economist last night about a study which found people actually perceive sound when they smell and taste things.  We also sense flavors based on what we're listening to at the time.  So while we may not have latent telepathic abilities, we seem to have latent synesthetic ones.  Maybe that's why we can hear this.

We are so powerful!  Or crazy.

Some of you out there probably don't hear anything when you watch this gif.  Here's where I would explain why, but that's today's first unsolved mystery.  I couldn't find any explanation for this aural-optical sense blurring.  I'll just have to ask an expert sometime.  Moving on!

I thought I might try this out on my V8 juice and came up with some interesting sounds.  The first thing I heard was low double reeds, but bassoons have a clearer sound than vegetables so I figured some bass clarinets were involved to get that Miles Davis smoke-around-the-tone-center sound.  But what are they playing?  Maybe it's just the legato flavors talking here, but I'm hearing a Debussy flow.  Actually, I thinking specifically of Jack Horkheimer's Star Gazer show I use to see all the time on PBS.  That would probably be because the theme music is Arabesque no. 1 by Claude Debussy.  So ultimately V8 juice tastes a little like this video.

Anyway, this blog isn't about V8 juice.  It's about beer, and today I'm trying Fort Collins Brewery's Red Banshee.

At first I can't hear anything over the dark, roast chocolate, but the sounds show up eventually.  The Economist article mentioned that bitter flavors produce low pitches so I made a concerted effort to hear high notes out of basal skepticism, but it didn't work.  I have to say that Red Banshee is just like Princess Vespa in Spaceballs.  She's a bass.  But unlike the song the future Druish queen sings in her cell before being rescued by Lone Starr and Barf, this beer is in minor.  To be more precise, I would peg it as Phrygian.  If you had a music teaching ballsy enough to teach little kids a song about bears eating babies and girls getting hit by trains you might know the song Benjy Met The Bear.  That's Phrygian.  That's Red Banshee.  That sounds worse than it really is.  Phrygian provides you with all the minor tonalities but the lowered second imparts a sly aloofness, like it knows something and is toying with you.  Perhaps it does.  Before this beer took its name from an Irish omen of death, it was known as Retro Red.  And there's the other big unsolved mystery.  Why?  Did something terrible happen to the red wagon from the old label?  Is the beer in the witness protection program?  Did our malty yet bity Red Banshee used to be a Red BanHE?  If that's the case, you go girl!