A couple of years ago I wrote a love letter to Pretty Things.
Here I go again.
It’s so rare that I find their beer, but when I do they alter my brain, alter my heart, alter my soul.
Our Finest Regards, like Brautigan’s Confederate General From Big Sur or Pynchon’s Vineland, is a psychic journey through Barley Wine.
Fields of English barley transposed to the great plains and blown in the wind, warm and sweet with marigold petals and circling crows.
Fences keep you in, wanting you to stay, to remain, to be enveloped in the depths of toffee coated boozy heaven.
In the distance The Flying Burrito Brothers play their favourite English Big Band Tunes, you realise your favourite song is by Zakary Thaks and your fringe is so long that the police take notice.
But your leather waistcoat is the coolest, the girls are in love, the teachers despise you and wishing them your finest regards you know you’re The Face.
Whistling The Great Banana hoax you swagger full of chest warming brandy booze to your secret geek lair, the walls lined with vinyl and beat poetry and cinnamon sticks.
Reaching for Vonnegut you lay back in your favourite leather beanbag, sniffing pine resin and garden flowers.
Eventually the rabbit hole spits you out and you wake to find Pretty Things smiling down on you like the parents of a freak child.
I love Pretty Things.
They do my brain in.
Source: Cotteridge Wines
