Action Figures & Their Beers - White Chicks

by Beedo Sookcool
on 2013-03-25, 06:36:23

WHITE LADY

The Cairngorm Brewing Company brewed this crystal wheat beer “in the Highlands of Scotland.” A “Bavarian style wheat beer, with additional hints of roast malt for colour. Brewed wth orange peel and coriander to give fruit flavours with a hint of spice.” I suppose it was brewed to celebrate 50 years of skiing in the Cairngorm National Park, if the small round badge next to the main label is anything to go by, but the labels on this bottle aren’t as effusively informative as those on many other beers.

So, a beer called White Lady with a white bird (specifically, a partridge) on the label. Oh, whatever action figure could possibly get paired up with this? As soon as I saw this beer on the supermarket shelf, I thought: “Temple of Darkness” Sorceress from Masters of the Universe Classics. A strangely-coloured (or rather, non-coloured) variant based on art from one of the 1980s mini-comics, she was originally only available at a few conventions. (Don’t get me started on other convention exclusives.) But the great thing about Mattel is that they have the easiest convention exclusives to get hold of. (Don’t get me started on Strobo, either.) Anyone from anywhere in the world can (usually) go to Mattel’s website after the convention is over and order the exclusives, to have them delivered right to their door, without having travel and/or scalper middlemen involved. No other line I collect has that option. There’s just one problem: organisation. ToD Sorceress, here, was meant to go on sale on Mattel’s website in Mid-December 2012. This was mentioned in several press releases and disseminated to all the MOTU fan-sites. And then they moved up the sale date to Mid-November without telling anyone. It was only because I idly clicked onto Mattel’s site one day (to see if there were any new updates), that I noticed she was up for sale, and managed to order her a few days before she sold out . . . several weeks before she was supposed to go on sale. Now, I understand why her sale date was moved up: December 2012 was a huge month for MOTU Classics, involving a standard figure (Mosquitor), a never-before-released giant figure (Procrustus), and the largest MOTU figure ever made for retail (Granamyr the dragon). Those three alone came to almost $150 before shipping, so another figure made available during the Christmas Crush period would’ve strained just about every fan’s wallets beyond breaking point. Needless to say, word of the new sale date was slow to get out, and many collectors missed out and were not pleased.

Oh, yeah, I’m supposed to be discussing beer as well, aren’t I? At 4.7% ABV, it’s within the Average range for beer potency. The ingredients list struck me as familiar as I was reading the label and sipping away, and then it hit me: Blue Moon also used orange and coriander, but it used oatmeal as well. As a result, White Lady is similar to Blue Moon, but not as mellow. It’s sharper, but not unpleasantly so. Without the creamy, balancing influence of the oats, the orange and coriander are a bit harder to detect as individual flavours, with the orange dominating the coriander, anyway. While it’s a very good beer, and I certainly wouldn’t turn it down if someone offered it to me, I haven’t seen it in the supermarkets since I picked up the two bottles I bought for review purposes. Also, I prefer Blue Moon, which just edges out White Lady in terms of balance, mellowness, and flavour.

Drink this if you also like: Blue Moon, Stroh’s, Belgian beers, wheat beers.