The Gestalt Review

A coconut falls off a tree in Charlie Chalk. The characters spend 10 minutes talking about it and no-one knows what to do.

OR

A mine, made out of poor-quality chewable vitamins, which you are pushed down in an unpleasant manner.

Brains have achieved remarkable things with this beer, as it may well not exist.  It’s quantum beer - sure, it looks like beer, but upon drinking and swallowing a mouthful it immediately becomes clear that there’s no taste swiftly followed by no aftertaste, making the whole affair somewhere in the middle of distressing and confusing.  The only way to tell if you are drinking it is to leave marks down the side of the glass for reference.

Tremendously uninspiring.  Like drinking washed, distilled grass and daisies on a slightly sloping hill.

Imagine you’re six or seven, and you’ve cunningly hidden a pot of Petit Filou down the back of a radiator.  You come back to it a few days later when mum’s cooking in the kitchen and you sneaking eat it, licking it right out of the packaging as a spoon would have required forethought and you’re not about that right now.  It tastes weird, but you’re okay with that, as it’s super-secret and it’s yours.

Summer’s dying - it’s late August, early September. You’re standing by a woodpile at the edge of a forest as the sun is thinking about maybe calling it a day. Your mouth is full of washers and you’re on the lookout for hedgehogs - and although you haven’t seen one in months, you’re feeling very lucky about finding one.

A Robin may or may not be floating at the edge of your vision. You are unsure about this.

Like melted black iMac keyboards in good blended scotch.

Headless Dog is not an image or a concept, but a memory of an unpleasant experience. You sit on the plane back home remembering that time you were in Eastern Europe (or Russia, the entire trip was kind of hazy) and you were at dinner and drinks with three large men with shaven heads. One of them was called Karlov. They lead you to an unpainted concrete room with a rusty metal door (after quite a long drive), and you are sat down on a red bench and told to wait for something impressive.

And there it is; the titular headless dog, tapdancing awkwardly around in the centre of the room. They’re cheering and clapping and as it finishes, they ask you if you enjoyed their little show and although you say yes, you feel that it was wholeheartedly disturbing.

This beer tastes of disappointment - like the memory of opening a plastic toy you thought was going to be awesome but turned out to be rubbish. It uses batteries (which are of course unsupplied) and there is far too much packaging and you don’t have scissors. You stand in the kitchen at around 4.15pm on a Saturday as the sun is starting to disappear behind clouds. You have saved up for ages to buy it and now you’re angry at -

- Yourself, for wasting the money

- The toy shop owner, for not telling you what a piece of crap it was

- Your parents, generically

This beer is intrinstically wrong. It’s somewhere between licking whiskey out of a cow or, in a more focused vein, like being the man in a MFF porn shoot set in a barn and you’re getting distracted from the job at hand by both the previous presence and the apparent absence of animals. You can still smell them, but where have they gone?

You are standing outside a pretty good party on a ship, at night, and you’ve left your coat inside. It’s a clear night and you can see the stars. You don’t know where you’re going but you’re fundamentally OK with that. You are alone but there is nothing missing.