Hoptopia Projection

Zach Rosen is passionate about beer and especially figuring out how to pair it with other elements as a pathway to perception. This last weekend, Brew Reverie, a company  he helped found, put on Hoptopia, an extravaganza based on this very theme. Naturally there were many delectable beers to sample, all of them from local breweries, but there were also foods to try specially concocted by a master chef to match a particular beer’s intricate flavors. And it worked. The tastes balanced each other to a tee.

In two rooms upstairs, we set up video, sound and lighting to pair with two other distinct types of beer.

Hoptopia Pairing Room One

In the one room, we used yellow and reddish imagery of slow moving lava lamps globs and colored suds and bubbles to create the ambience. This, backed by  yellow and red lighting and the right ambient music, actually matched the served sample very well. Perhaps you’re thinking that it was all due to  directed perception on the part of the sampler. But I assure you, I walked in there with the remains of a dark beer from the downstairs  and it didn’t jibe at all. However  the crisp, slightly sharp and complex sample beer from the room did!

Hoptopia Pairing Room Two

In the second room, I don’t think we did quite so well. The scene was wonderful; We aimed three projectors at the floor flooding it with overlapping black and white water imagery that gave  it complexity and depth. Unfortunately the sound for the room didn’t register and left it feeling oddly empty. The green lighting didn’t help either. In my opinion, this combination didn’t match the proffered beer. In retrospect, I’d say that the video worked but should have been slightly slower, the sound could have been vastly improved and that red and/or blue lighting would have worked much better than the green.

It’s all an experiment.