Ways of seeing (beer)* // Variations on Zinnebir
(*With apologies to John Berger)
“Incoherent scrawls done by a frantic old man in death’s antechamber.”
Not a hyperliterate Untappd beer review but the words of 20th century English art historian Douglas Cooper, written in 1973 and reproduced on a wall of Brussels’ royal art museum as part of an exhibition on Pablo Picasso. Cooper was dismissing a series of colourful, energetic paintings produced by Picasso in his final decade in which he cited or re-interpreted works from Velázquez, Manet, Rembrandt, Goya, and others. Unlike Cooper, I quite liked their gaudiness, but when we visited the exhibition in late-October I was in the minority. The opinion of my kids leaned more towards Cooper’s, and when we got home we pulled out an old catalogue from an exhibition on “Picasso and the Masters”, and they had fun giggling over what strange shapes Picasso twisted the figures into in Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and looking for the Infanta and her poofy dress in Picasso’s variation of Velázquez’s Las Meninas.
Making a beer is not like making art
Alcohol features sporadically in Picasso’s works and judging by two of the still lifes in the Brussels exhibition he must have been a Bass drinker. But it was his late-era variations on the Old Masters that most caught my eye because earlier that same month, across town and in a very different discipline, Yvan de Baets of Brasserie de la Senne was involved in his own reinterpretation of a (modern) Belgian classic. To celebrate the 20th birthday of the brewery’s Zinnebir, De Baets had commissioned three brewers - Nino Bacelle at Dottignies’ Brouwerij De Ranke, Daniel Thiriez of the eponymous northern French brewery, and Brasserie de la Mule’s Joel Galy - to produce their own variation on de la Senne’s flagship.
Making a beer is not like making art. An artist may make sketches or drawings, and might produce a test canvas or two, but eventually there is an end point and a finished article - painting, sculpture, film - that once ready for display is rarely if ever altered. Beer is a living product that, once packaged, continues to evolve in response to its environment; a beer drunk after six months on a supermarket shelf is not the same beer drunk fresh from a fridge a week after bottling. A beer evolves in other ways too; the Zinnebir of 2022 is not the Zinnebir of 2002 because of innumerate conscious and unconscious decisions made in those 20 years. Brewers are constantly tweaking their beers, paddling furiously out of sight of the drinker to provide them the same - or better - experience every time. Over the course of 20 years a beer is pulled from its original template by incremental changes to brewing processes, new or different raw materials, or marketing decisions altering its colour, bitterness, or alcohol content.
The analogy falls down in another way too; Picasso was riffing on the ideas of others whereas De Baets was inviting others in to riff on his ideas. But consider Picasso’s motivation in painting 58 iterations of Las Meninas in one six-month spurt: “If someone wants to copy Las Meninas…and if that one was me, I would say…what if you put them [the figures] a little to the right or left? I'll try to do it my way, forgetting about Velázquez. The test would surely bring me to modify or change the light because of having changed the position of a character. So, little by little, what would be a detestable Meninas for a traditional painter…would be my Meninas.”
Picasso wasn’t interested in rote copy; he wanted to explore the different elements of a painting and in so doing make his version. De Baets was inviting these brewers to do the same with Zinnebir, taking the beer a little to the left or to the right, substituting in different hops or yeast where Picasso was playing with colour, light, shade, and positioning. All of which convinced me - if convincing were needed - to undertake a side-by-side comparative tasting session of original Zinnebir and these three new variations. But there was a problem. I don’t actually like deconstructing beers in the same way I do art.
Because decoding paintings makes me feel smart. And decoding beers makes me feel dumb.
Ways of Seeing
Art I can enjoy on an intellectual or a visceral level. I can look at something like Picasso’s Bouteille de Bass and employ my limited grasp of art history to convince myself that I get what he’s doing. Or, I can stand in front of his Guernica and succumb to a visceral experience, substituting emotion for theory.
With beer, I struggle to do either. I have the same basic understanding; I’ve read the Moshers and the Palmers and the Alworths. If I’m confused by a picture I need only look at its label for a nudge in the “right” direction. If I’m struggling to decipher a beer, I can find out what I “should” be tasting by checking the ingredients list. But I just don’t enjoy it as much.
Art critic John Berger, in the first episode of his 1972 Ways of Seeing documentary and later in the book of the same name, says: “The most important thing about paintings is that they are silent, still.” Quiet, he writes, “in a sense that information never is.” With a painting, I can stand there for as long as I want, letting my eyes do the work and inhabiting a silence that Berger writes “closes the distance between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at it.” It’s that proximity, that stillness, that I miss when tasting a beer. Beers are loud, chaotic, immediate and ephemeral. I can stare and stare and stare at a painting, and the details accumulate the more I look. When I drink a beer, the sensory input comes all at once and I struggle to articulate what tastes are on my tongue, or the volatile compounds circulating in and out of my nose, before the information vanishes. I simply don’t have enough time to hang complex sensory data on a brisk swallow of a small mouthful of fizzy liquid.
This is why I’ve avoided publishing beer reviews. “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”, and all that. And it’s why I abandoned the tasting idea and the beers in the fridge. But spurred by a probably-misguided zeal for pushing myself out of my comfort zone, and the search for content for the website, I returned to the idea in early January. And because fuck Wittgenstein.
Mossy granite and strawberry Haribos
The format of the tasting was simple: classic Zinnebir alongside the three birthday variations - Ribbeniz from De Ranke, evoking the “old Zinnebir”; Thiriez’s Zinne de Flandres, brewed with French hops; and, bottom-fermented Zinne Lager from La Mule.
I’ve written at length - here and elsewhere - about the depth of my affection for classic Zinnebir. In a July 2020 article for Pellicle (read it here, and become a patron here), I swooned:
Zinnebir comes burnished orange in the glass, topped by an artless whipped meringue foam. From this comes aromas of zesty citrus and a little pear drop, leavened with slight bready notes alongside characteristic Belgian clove-y spiciness. A gulp of Zinnebir will have all of this alongside a grassy bitterness imparted from German and Slovenian noble hops….Zinnebir has a good body—not hefty or syrupy, but not too light either. This is all rounded out by assertive but not abrasive bitterness.
On tasting it again, everything above is still there; it’s golden, for sure, rich and warming and reassuring. It is peppery, grapefruity and gummy too, with apricot and peach tones (though I struggle to distinguish those two). It is soft, not overly fizzy, and kicks you with that grassy, hard-edged bitterness in the finish, like licking mossy granite.
Of the variations Zinne Lager’s first, because it was a draught-only release which I drank on launch day. Brewed with de la Senne scion Joel Galy, it is the same Zinnebir except for the yeast; which is to say it’s not the same Zinnebir at all, as it's a bottom-fermented Lager. It is a little lighter and less burnished amber than standard Zinnebir, and a touch less opaque. Zinne Lager’s gumminess is toned down, several degrees drier and with more of a kind of Cracotte breadiness than the control. The bitter finish is maybe more assertive, longer-lasting, and with a whiff of sulphur.
Ribbeniz from De Ranke - where de la Senne brewed from 2006-2010 - was influenced by the Zinnebir brewed during that period, when the yeast and hops were different, giving it “a completely different fermentation profile…a pronounced and rustic bitterness, and…[a] well-spiced aroma.” It smells of reddish berries, the large chewy strawberries from a bag of Haribo starmix. There is a slight pepperiness in there too, and I do catch a hint of smokiness - though that may be because I read the description before drinking it - and even a touch of the Westmalle’s. The carbonation is distinctly softer, and this variation is not juicy in a way that standard Zinnebir is. That beer’s estery fruitiness still lingers, as does the bitterness, but they’re more reticent - hanging back like wallflowers where the original confronts you on the dancefloor. I also catch, or think I do, a discordant note of overly-diluted MiWadi lime cordial. It is, altogether, a ruddier, vaguer, less assertive beer.
Zinne de Flandres is different again, in different ways. De la Senne brewed at Brasserie Thiriez in the northern French village of Esquelbecq from 2007-2010, and Daniel Thiriez was given permission to use only French hops grown in Alsace. Those hops bring a mellower fruitiness, lime (again) and maybe blueberries. Then again, when did I last sniff a blueberry? It’s got the same pillowy softness as Zinnebir, closer to the original but with edges where the control is smooth, and smooth where the original is abrasive. De La Senne says it tastes like physalis. I’ve never eaten a physalis; when you have small children, you stick to the old reliables: grapes, bananas, apples. And mandarins in winter. Are the French hops bringing a more German character than you’d find in ordinary Zinnebir? Objectively this makes no sense; I know Alsace is the most German of French regions - everyone who studied history for the Irish Leaving Cert should know this - but OG Zinnebir is actually made with Bavarian hops.
None of these beers are “incoherent scrawls” and are accomplished in their own right. As spins on Zinnebir they’re distinct enough to make for interesting sensory diversions into counterfactual brewing history. But like Picasso’s 58 variations might prompt you to consider Velázquez’s original with fresh eyes, these beers were a welcome excuse to revisit the original and be reminded of why I described it in that Pellicle article as “a comforting, orderly, and warming retreat”, familiar and satisfying.
I didn’t quite find Berger’s stillness, but I did manage to salvage something from the information overload. However, I know - because I’ve read the brewery descriptions - I failed to notice major flavour and aroma characteristics in each beer. But beer reviewing is subjective, and there are noses out there better able - thanks to training, genetics, or both - to catch what I missed.
And that, beyond the intellectual vanity and the sensory chaos, is why I think I dislike decoding beers: I am uncomfortable with this ambiguity. I trust my eyes, dodgy as they are, and the neural pathways they follow. I don’t trust the messages coming from my olfactory system and the detours they take into memory and recall.
Despite all this, there is a reason I became a beer writer and not an art critic (well, there are many). Because good and all as Velázquez’s royal portrait or Picasso’s colourful interpretation might be, on a terrace on a sunny day in Brussels, a 17th century oil on canvas just doesn’t hit the same way as a cold glass of Zinnebir.
