A Tasting

In a bathtub filled with ice I arrange a selection of beers.

Many are from a time when bars were filled

with smoke and blue singlets, others gleam like pilgrims

preserved by winter burial. Some were boutiqued

to the point of being so far up the brewer’s coil

distil has been replaced by crafted and essential oil

as if the word beer itself had become linguistically distasteful.

When I open, prematurely, a friend’s attempt at stout

flipping the wire swing-arm to release a ceramic cap

a sound like the compressed report of an air rifle

is followed by the reek of creek water, the remains

of dogs, and the hessian bags they were drowned in.

I’m no coinosseur, but I can tell a mongrel

from some hopped-up, spring-fed pilsener

in a cafe-brewery, its blackboard advertising pulled pork

in chalked cursive, the staff drawing beers to Bon Iver

and extolling the virtues of slow food, clean air.

Next I turn to the long necks - favourite of shearers.

For years they were lifted throat-first from fridges

in outstation sheds, opened with a knuckled flourish

and swallowed hard, each bottle tipped over - dead

and dying soldiers on the boards. I can hear the drone

of flies and stories, shorn wethers standing in waves

of lanolin heat, the sun going down like the lid

of a tin knocked from the sky by a .410 shotgun.

Digging, I find a bottle whose label had slipped away

prompting a blind tasting. There is blood, sweat

and the cold residue of a kiss that took me years

to disengage from. Distracted, I keep drinking

craving that one marker for a time when love

was a spell you surrendered to, then passed out under.

Late at night or early in the morning, unable to tell

Melbourne bitter from something a Belgian monk

might have finessed from cuttlefish ink, herbs

and horse blood, I sleep. Waking to a hangover

like contained scrub-fire behind my eyes, the ice

gone to water, the brewing history of five states

and a few home-grown failures competing for space

in my mouth, I lie back and listen to the bells

of the last bottles knocking against each other.

Anthony Lawrence