This is another pub/beer post. We’ve been away for the weekend to an annual college reunion in Portsmouth. This time it has not been annual but biennial, what should have been March 2020, then October 2020, then March 2021, has now happened October 2021!
We were in a wonderful hotel in Portsmouth for the aforesaid reunion, and spent the evenings in the hotel bar with the old friends we were reuniting with. Being a hotel there was not the usual range of beers on draft, and so we were drinking bottled beer. The brewery was Flower Pots (the name really tickled me!) and the beer was excellent:
Our award-winning on-site brewery is 50 yards away from The Flower Pots Inn, located in the picturesque village of Cheriton in Hampshire. Within these walls we have been carefully crafting fine cask ales and beers since 1993.
We enjoyed our several very much. The name Buster featured which we remembered because of the hero dog in our pub who was lost for nearly two weeks but survived and in fact was in the Dolphin tonight! So, Busters Best…
Buster’s Best was awarded the Silver medal at The Winchester Beer Festival in March 2020. Some of Hampshire’s finest malted barley and a touch of wheat is combined with Fuggles and First Gold hops to produce a traditional well rounded English beer. Full bodied, nutty and biscuit, with a sweet and smooth bitterness. Bronze in colour with a creamy head, Buster’s is an easy drinking Best Bitter and is named in great fondness after “Buster” the black and white fox terrier who resided behind the bar at our Flower Pots Inn. It also happens to be our Brewer’s favourite!
The beer we had was very good – and we have come to the conclusion that bottled beer these days, although not as good as draught beer, is in fact excellent! We concluded this after sampling more than several bottles over the weekend.
Home again, and back in the Dolphin this evening, we had a couple of pints of our favourite, Otter. We very much enjoyed Buster’s Best in Portsmouth, but a pint (or couple) of Otter pulled at the pump, was still better than the really excellent Buster in bottles which we had enjoyed! Now we need to seek out pubs which have Busters’ on draught!
Lois Elsden 