Bad Taste Brewery, as the venture is known, is a recent undertaking and with the wild-eyed enthusiasm of the recently converted I extol the virtues of home production to any who care to listen. Audiences have thus far proved willing, no doubt aided by copious samples thrust upon them. Still this year I have created over 60 liters of very creditable “Tyburn” London Bitter, somewhat less “Ypres” Belgian Trappist-Style Double, and over 150 bottles Italian mixed grape red (“Monte Cassino”) and white (“Anzio”), Californian white (“San Andreas”), French Merlot (“Bastille”) and Spanish Rioja (“Guernica”). Ingredients for two different German lagers are in stock for my own mini-Oktoberfest this autumn. Rum and chilli vodka fermentation begins in September.
What, you might be thinking, has this to do with wargaming? Well, in education we are given to talk about “transferable skills” as if in some way a skill that can be used in two jobs is necessarily better than one with only a single application. I maintain that under certain circumstances my transferable ability to word process is rather less use than knowing the untransferable skill involved in unblocking my drain. Anyway, the planning and organization skills I have developed through long years of building and painting armies, along with the ability to read and follow complicated instructions, have proved invaluable in the production of ales, beers, lagers, wines and spirits.
Similarities and skill transfer does not end with the organisational practicalities of brewing and gaming. Brewing involves short intense periods of activity followed by a lot of waiting around with the occasional inspection to check all is going to plan. Likewise game design is, for me at least, a process of doing nothing very much for weeks (sometimes months) followed by one or two days of feverish writing.
At the beginning of this year I had in mind that I wanted to “do a 1066 game”. Nothing beyond that, no idea of scale or unit size, whether I wanted to refight battles or skirmishes or both, or on whom I wished to focus. Anyway, in January I inflicted considerable pain on my credit card to buy an assortment of texts, primary and secondary, along with conducting a review of the books and magazines in the book shed. Months of reading, interspersed with other projects, followed. Then in early August the fermentation process yielded an idea and I “knew” how to do “Hastings – A view from the Shieldwall”, a small unit game were players fight a tiny portion of the entire battle. Some refinement is needed – even my best brews need filtering – but I hope to present the game fully matured at next year’s Conference of Wargamers.
So raise a glass to fermentation, good things come to those who wait.
Cheers!
Matthew Hartley
August 2009
