“A couple of beers can help creativity.” That’s what Mark Smith, of business development and growth organisation Unlocking Potential, said. And he was speaking on a university campus, so it must be true.
It’s all about alpha waves in the brain, apparently. Alpha waves give us that creative buzz that the audience he was addressing of content creators and marketers try so hard to harness. The beers aid relaxation and the relaxation kick-starts the alpha waves.
I hadn’t gone along to this event with any intention of tying it in with beer at all. Mark was just the entrée, though. Among the speakers at this Creative Inspiration evening run by Cornwall Social Media Café, who included a PR professional, a former London advertising executive and an artist, was Guillermo Alvarez, brewer at the Rebel Brewing Co. I hadn’t realised he was going to be speaking. Will you have trouble speaking in public? I asked him beforehand. No, he said. Within a five minute time constraint he’d have trouble stopping. And so it proved to be.
Simple ingredients, myriad possibilities.
Picture: beergenie.co.uk
Having attended with an open mind and notebook, expecting insights to the creative process from a marketing point of view, I anticipated a bit of down time as Guillermo addressed a lay audience with all those facts I already knew about brewing. But when he started comparing the holy quartet of malt, water, yeast and hops with the four amino acids that make life, my ears pricked up. He is, of course, a scientist first and foremost, a yeast geek no less, but he was soon taking the creativity baton and running with it. A brewer, he said, was like an artist painting from his own head with these four ingredients and with no model in front of him.
And that makes you think, doesn’t it? It makes you think about all those brewers – how many now? 1,300 or so across the UK? Not to mention all the rest around the world – entering the brewery, looking at the four essentials of brewing life and coming up with myriad beers, different styles, colours, tastes, textures, day in, day out, the mash tun and copper the palette and easel. All from four essential ingredients.
Then there’s the marketing, the pumpclip designs. A picture can be changed by the frame within which it is placed, said Guillermo. Quite. Remember all those beers you thought were fantastic but might never have tried because the pump clip looked like it had been designed by a disturbed toddler, or conversely the beer with a build-up like our current cricket team that just failed to live up to the billing?
A brewer in full flow, enthusing, evangelising, is a wonder to behold. The fact there were some beers afterwards, from Rebel, of course, was a fitting tail to the tale.
And now, I’m off for another couple of beers. Just the two, mind you, to get those creative juices flowing. Don’t want to end up as creative as a newt…