Words & Music by Mike Power

I think it was Shakespeare who first transcribed the immortal question: You want a beer? Or maybe the question was only implied by the imploring eyes of his portrait.

As if, on cracking open a cold bottle of beer and taking a healthful gulp, he thinks: Is this the last one? And, if so, the question – purple and pink – presents itself: Do I drink this slowly to make it last, or quickly for maximum effect before it evaporates like the snow?

Those hours that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same,
And that unfair with fairly doth excel;
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there;
Sap check'd with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness everywhere:
Then, were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was.
     But flowers distill'd, though they with winter meet,
     Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.