Beer Interlude: Mons Abbey Dubbel by Belgh Brasse

7/10
This Quebec brewery out of Amos, Quebec (if you are looking on a map for it, find Ottawa and keep going north. No, further north. Keep going. Almost there. Yes, way the hell up there.) specializes in brewing Belgian style beers. Every time I'm up there, I try to pick up a bottle or 5 of their beer.

This one opens with a powerful whiff of bottle-conditioned goodness. It gets an instant head and you have to be ready to pour it immediately. To the eye, it's very dark but if you hold it up to the light, you can see ruby red tones.

It doesn't have an overly strong bouquet. There's a hint of chocolate and coffee. When you taste it, the chocolate comes on strong and the coffee fades away. Other notes replace the coffee. I'm reminded of strawberries and raspberries so this is a good thing. The flavour lingers and the slight coffee returns. Going down, this is a velvety smooth brew.

But it's velvet hammer. It's 8% alcohol and I have an entire bottle to myself that I will enjoy. I shall probably be to blotto to post responsibly but I don't care.

Salut!

Beer Interlude: Road Trip!

Last weekend, my lovely wife fulfilled a Christmas promise and booked a brewery tour for the Niagara area (actually, the breweries were all in the Niagara on the Lake area instead). Now Niagara on the Lake is particularly noted for being wine country but it turns out that there are a few craft breweries making their presence known. We were accompanied by our good friends Catherine and David. Our driver for the tour was Jim and he made all of the arrangements.

The first stop was as at Oast House (http://oasthousebrewers.ca/). An oast building was originally used to dry hops in England. I've actually had the brewery's Biere de Garde before when I was having a dinner at the Weinkeller (an excellent restaurant in Niagara that I highly recommend). I enjoyed the Biere de Garde but found it a little too hoppy at the end for me to love it completely. We did a tour of the back area to see the kettles, vats, and whatnot. I also learned that hops added at the start of fermenting bring taste to the mix and hops added at the end bring bitterness.

I hadn't really realized what a hop plant looks like. Now I know. It's basically a vine that grows from basically nothing to 30 feet every summer and puts out what looks like small sort-of pine cones. Oast House has a small circle of them growing and they have an number of farmers growing hops for them as well so they should be able to use their own hops starting next year.

We sampled their Saison and their Barn Raiser. Both are bitter in the finish. The Saison, which I enjoyed the most, starts off with a nice lemon taste before the hops take over. I have two bottles which I'm going to let sit around at room temperature for a while to mellow them out a bit. The Barn Raiser was a brown ale that was OK but really too much bitterness for me to fully enjoy.

Next was lunch at the Old Winery restaurant (http://www.theoldwineryrestaurant.com/). Very nice place but a bit off-theme for a brewery tour. It's Italian in theme and I had the wood oven veggie pizza. I accompanied it with a Leffe Brown Ale to bring a bit of balance to the bitterness I had encountered earlier.

Off to Silversmith (http://www.silversmithbrewing.com/). The restaurant part of this brewpub is in a former church. It looks fantastic on the outside and on the inside. Unlike many Canadian bars and pubs, there's no TVs and the background music is barely there. They use chalk to write down what they are serving. Fantastic! We got our reserved seats and awaited our flight of samples. I was so looking forward to them, especially the Damn Buster English ale.

And I was so disappointed. I started with their wheat beer, figuring to start with the lightest in colour and taste. It wasn't overly flavourful but it was overly hopped. I was surprised at how bitter it was. And the samples just kept getting more and more bitter the darker they were. The Damn Buster was basically undrinkable. David said that was like drinking medicine and I have to agree. Silversmith, there's no award for making the bitterest beer! If there is, there shouldn't be!

Off to school next. Niagara College has a culinary department that includes brewing courses. Of course they have samples! I tried their Butler's Rangers brew, which was bitter but drinkable and their First Draft ale, which was lighter in colour and taste but still on the bitter side. I know that David tried a couple. He handed me a glass of Red Eye Sour. Now I've had the Rodenbach Sour and it might be the best beer I've ever had (if it isn't, it's right up there). Red Eye Sour is the polar opposite. It might be the worst I've ever tasted. It basically has the same taste as the ultra-hot sauces usually have but without the heat. Absolutely nasty. I'm hoping the teacher gave whoever "brewed" that stuff an F. Just because you can dump a gallon of cheap and nasty hot sauce in beer doesn't mean that you should.

(As a side note: what's up with all this bitter beer in the Niagara region. A year or so ago, my wife and I went to the Syndicate brewpub in Niagara Falls and I really didn't like their beer all that much because of the lingering bitterness. Maybe Niagara folk are made of sterner stuff than me?)

Our final stop was the Olde Angel Inn in Niagara on the Lake (http://www.angel-inn.com/home.php). This was the perfect place to end the tour. The pub part is very much English in style so I thought I would order a pint of Angel English ale. I'm glad I did. It took half a pint to cleanse my palette from all of the accumulated bitterness. The remaining half went down slowly and smoothly. The perfect pint to end the day.

Soviet Platoon for Chain of Command

At Hot Lead, I purchased a box of 28mm Soviet WW2 troops from Warlord along with a MMG and a mortar (technically an 81mm but it will serve as a proxy for a platoon mortar). I finally completed them last weekend.

Here are the troops ready to kill the fascists.

 

These figures paint up nicely. Here is a section:

To give you an idea of how nicely they are sculpted, here's a close up:

Most of the paint is Vallejo. I used Russian Green for the helmet, Reaper tanned skin, Russian Uniform Green, Leather Brown for the belt and cartridge cases, Violet Green (?) for the blanket, and I think Khaki for the straps and puttees. I then gave them a coating of my depleting Devlan Mud was. I then went back and hit the high areas with the original colour to counteract the darkening and colour change done by the wash. I finished them off with a couple of sprays of Dullcote. I've never used it before and it's a little shinier than I thought it would be.

Just in case my troops do not show sufficient bravery and self sacrifice, I've done a Commissar. Unfortunately, the picture does not show the nice blue he has on his cap. Trust me, it's there and nicely painted too.

I have some anti-tank troops as well. Here are the tank hunters. I can have them throw an anti-tank grenade or a molotov cocktail. I've updated the flame in the cocktail after this photo so that it is a bit brighter than what is shown here:

Here is the longer ranged solution:

Here are the metal figures I bought. I prefer the plastics to the more cartoonish metals. Judge for yourself. Here's the mortar team:

And here is the MMG team (at least the ones that came in the blister pack. Obviously, I'll add a couple of rifle men in the game to bring the team up to full strength):

Finally, a sniper team. This is my favourite photo because it captures the animation and detail in these figures best.

I do have a few questions though. I want to get another platoon. I could go for another box of Warlord but I'm wondering about the Wargame Factory Russians. Are the comparable in size and bulk? Would they mix and match well? Do they have a nice mix of weapons and poses? Do they have options that are not available in the Warlord box?

Backgrounds for Canadian leaders for Chain of Command

With his At the Sharp End CoC supplement, Rich provided several tables in which you can roll to see the backgrounds of the senior and junior leaders. Sadly, he only provided those tables for British, American, Soviet, and German units. Here's my attempt to fill this omission:

Location:
1 Down East
2 Quebec
3-4 Ontario
5 Praries
6 West Coast

	Canadian Officers
2	A scion of a prominent family, you could have avoided the war.  But there's the family name to consider and no shirking is allowed. The CO is very happy to have someone so connected in the regiment. Add +1 to the CO's opinion.
3	Mountie. They always get their man and you left the RCMP to go and get the biggest baddest guy around.  +3 to your age roll
4-5	University graduate. Your degree won't help much on the battlefield, but at least you are an officer. + 3 to your age roll
6	A manager in a company. Your skill at dealing with people has helped your career in the army as well. +3 to your age roll and +1 to the men's opinion.
7	A patriot. Pa fought in the Great War and now it's your turn to give the Hun a thrashing.
8	Government administrator. You oversaw a number of government work projects and invested well. Curiously, the men, many of whom spent some time on the dole, don’t seem to like you. Subtract 1 from the men’s opinion and +3 to your age roll.
9-10	Up from the ranks. An enlisted man pre-war but your professionalism and expertise were needed when the army expanded.  Roll again on the NCO background table. Add +4 to your roll for age. Add +1 to the men’s opinion
11-12	A newspaper man. Just when your career hits rock bottom with the obituary beat, you became the lead writer of the great story of the 20th century: the liberation of Europe. Providing you survive.

	Canadian NCOs
2-3	A food preparation architect. Your skills with the knife and various ingredients make you popular with the men and officers a like. Farm animals are not safe in the vicinity of the unit.
4	A transportation engineer.  You can drive anything with wheels provided you don’t mind the occasional dent or ding.
5	A railroad engineer. You’ve seen all of Canada, and now it’s time to see Europe. At least you are not shoveling coal to do it.
6	A natural resource engineer. Whether its fish from the sea, wheat from the field, or syrup from the tree, you harvest with the best of them.
7	A lumberjack and you’re OK. Even if your choice of undergarments is a bit curious and you are an amateur herbier.
8	An information specialist. Your typing skills should have made you a clerk in the army, but somehow you have ended up with a gun. Hopefully you will survive until you can get back to your rightful position in the safer rear areas .
9	A handyman who can do a little of everything, which helped your family survive the dirty 30’s. Perhaps you should have added a fancy descriptive title to your profession….
10-11	A hockey player. Because
12	An innovator who hopes that serving double cream double sugar coffee and donut holes will take off, eh!

Ruined building from 4Ground

This was another purchase at Hold the Line. I have just started with 28mm and I felt I needed to get a building or something to have an objective. J&M had a bunch of 4Ground buildings but I was feeling a bit of sticker shock with the prices of 28mm terrain and vehicles. They did have a Russian house that was interesting but I didn't feel like spending that kind of money when I really had no idea what it would look like constructed.

I really didn't have to worry. The assembly was easier and things went together well. One of the corners on the building didn't quite go properly but that is my own fault for missing the step in which you wrap the entire building with an elastic until the glue dries. Even with that mistake, the end result is a very nice looking ruin. In terms of time, I completed it over the course of a couple of baseball games on TV but this building also had a lot of fiddly parts. Now that I've done one of these types of buildings, my next one will be quicker.

All told, I am very impressed. I've already decided, once I scrape together the money, that I will be getting the three eastern front WW2 buildings from 4Ground. These buildings are perfect for those gamers who want a colourful building they can assemble and use quickly.