Bateman's Combined Harvest
The first time to taste the bottled version of this beer. Coming in a 500ml clear bottle, filtered and pasteurised, BB 11 JAN 2006, served cool in a straight imperial-pint glass. A: dark orangey amber in colour, coming with a thick layer of white fluffy froth, like aerated skimmed milk, breaking down slowly and leaving cottony chunks of foam here and there... semi-tiny bubbles ascend constantly at a moderate speed. Lookng not bad. S: lightly butter-scotch note upfront (I'm with GreenCard on this one), with sweet (orangey) as well as mildly sour (lemony) citrus notes to follow, plus a touch of salty-sweet edge and floral hop scents gradually creeping up; plenty of malts underneath, yet not easy to dicern which kind of malted-grain is in the mix... T: semi-chewy and semi-richly textured maltiness prevails upfront, laced with mildly burned-sugary sweetness, butterscotch and a sweet mashed-beans like grainy-gristy taste(?!) (supposedly something other than barley-malts?), while a semi-dryish, black-teaish and sour-sweet floral hints of hops linger in the end of tasting as a balancer. Short finish, alas. M&D: quite thin-bodied and turning even more thin-ish towards the end of tasting, whereas the carbonation is quite restrained, not intrusive. But the lightly skunky note from clear-bottling is apparently there, hindering some other flavours and aromas to come forward--quite different from the cask-version tasted sometime ago. The cask version is much better and fuller, IMO.