Batemans Booths Pour With Care

Originally published in What’s Brewing September 2003

Origin: Wainfleet, Lincolnshire, England
ABV: 4.5 per cent
Buy from Booths supermarkets

Booths, a regional supermarket chain in northwest England, offers an imaginative range of bottled beers, including bottle conditioned ales, that puts its national competitors to shame. The range is driven by the personal passion of beer buyer David Smith, who believes there’s “a lot of mileage” in real ale in a bottle, so long as you put some effort into educating your customers – a point the larger supermarkets seem slow to grasp.

Booths put that philosophy into practice when it became the first supermarket to launch its own brand bottle conditioned British ale. Pour With Care – its name reflecting its educational mission – was commissioned from Batemans of Wainfleet and launched in May 2001 to great success.

Family-owned independent Batemans – a CAMRA cause célèbre in the 1980s when it was threatened with a hostile takeover – is well-loved for its self-proclaimed “good honest ales” in cask. Its own widely distributed bottled range includes a number of interesting specialities, but all of them filtered, though not pasteurised, since the brewery finds bottle conditioning “too unpredictable”. It has however created the occasional BCA as a special, and worked enthusiastically on the Booths project.

The recipe was developed from scratch, though Stewart Bateman says David had a very clear idea of the kind of beer he was after. It ended up a rubyish amber ale with a grist of 53% Maris Otter pale, 35% wheat and 12% crystal malts, hopped half-in-half with Goldings and Challenger. It’s fermented in open squares and bottled unprimed from racking tanks with yeast in suspension: like all Batemans beers it’s suitable for vegans.

With its big, smooth, yellowish head it actually requires pouring with more care than some BCAs in order to get it into the glass in one smooth movement. Once accomplished, there’s a fruity aroma with generous peppery and slightly earthy hops, chocolate and banana notes (possibly from the wheat?).

The palate is rich, full-bodied and slightly cakey with marmitey malt, marmalade and crystal malt sappiness, turning quite sternly dry but still fruitily aromatic. There are more hops in the lengthy finish, with its malt and chocolate tones becoming dry and bitterish, and mineral, iodine-like hints around the side of the mouth.

Overall this is a big, robust and fruity but elegant glassful in a style that might have come from a new generation micro, except that it’s also unmistakably a Batemans beer – a quality Stewart attributes to the brewery’s dominant yeast strain. It’s great to see this pioneering partnership has yielded such a praiseworthy result.

Try also Butts Barbus Barbus, Hogs Back BSA, Hop Daemon Leviathan

Read more at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/booths-pour-with-care/14310/