How low can abvs go?

Just because some ales are lower in abv, it doesn't mean they must be lacking in taste, says Roger Protz.

On a day of blistering heat in London last week, the first pint of Bateman's GHA went down without touching the sides. The Lincolnshire brewery couldn't have picked a better day to launch its new golden ale: it was cool, malty and hoppy, and it wiped the sweat and the furrows from my fevered brow.

The golden ale section has become an important feature of the beer market in recent years. There are now so many of them that Camra, the Campaign for Real Ale, has added a golden ales section to its Champion Beer of Britain competition, due to be judged at the Great British Beer Festival next month.

This style serves a double function: it offers a wonderfully quenching addition to the range for cask ale drinkers and it reaches out to younger people with an attempt to switch them from mainstream bland lagers to beers with rich malt and hop flavours.

And Batemans' GHA — short for its famous old slogan Good Honest Ales — plugs a gap in its portfolio between the 3.7% abv XB and the 4.8% abv XXXB. Brewed with the finest East Anglian Maris Otter malting barley and English Challenger and East Kent Goldings hops, it's a complex and rewarding beer with juicy malt, spicy hops and a hint of butterscotch on the aroma, sweet malt, tangy hops and tart fruit in the mouth, and a bittersweet finish that becomes dry, but with good malt and fruit notes balancing the hoppy bitterness.

While I was savouring my second glass, I took to musing about the best type of beer to drink during a heat wave. Why people switch to lager bemuses me: you can't drink much of the lager produced by global brewers because you quickly become bloated by the high levels of carbon dioxide.

And I don't think strong ales hit the spot either. Alcohol and heat make you drowsy, rather than thirsty.

When I first started taking a serious interest in beer 30 years ago, a number of brewers, especially those based in the West Country, produced what were called "boy's bitters".

They were low in alcohol, around 3% abv, and were designed to refresh agricultural workers. The idea was that the beers would slake their thirsts, but were sufficiently weak to stop them falling into threshing machines after three pints.

Hall & Woodhouse had Badger Bitter at 3.1% abv and Whitbread, as a result of its merger mania in the 1970s, had picked up a beer called West Country Pale Ale. It was also 3.1% abv and both beers, as a result of relatively low malt content, zinged with marvellous hop character.

The term "boy's bitter" gave the beers a derisory image. Along with many dark milds, they disappeared from view. We live in a "premium" age and it's beers above 4% abv that are now heavily promoted and consumed.

It seems likely that we are in for several years of hot summers. We're told we will enjoy a "Mediterranean climate" within 20 years. If that's the case, then brewers had better plan for the hot and humid future and consider producing types of beer that can be consumed in quantity without being overwhelming.

There's a living and breathing example of a boy's bitter, produced by Ray Welton in his brewery in Horsham, West Sussex. Pridenjoy is just 2.8% alcohol. It would have been legal under American Prohibition and yet it's amazingly complex. It's brewed with pale, amber, chocolate, Munich and wheat malts and hopped with Bramling Cross and Northdown hops. It has a superb aroma of peppery hops, vinous fruit and biscuity malt, with ripe grain, hop resins and tangy fruit in the mouth and a long bittersweet finish, ending with tart fruit and bitter hops.

It stands as testament to just how much flavour you can pack in to a beer without the alcohol level going off the Richter scale.

There's also a case for resurrecting mild ale. Mild was for industrial workers what boy's bitters were for farm hands — they were malty and slightly sweet, designed to restore lost energy after eight hours in a

factory or down a mine. The style went into sharp decline in the post-war period, dismissed as a "cloth cap" beer.

Now the style is back in a small way. Many small craft brewers now have a mild in their locker, while bigger regional brewers — Brains in Cardiff, Holt's in Manchester and Cains in Liverpool, to name but three — are renowned for their dark milds.

Back to Batemans: as well as XB, XXXB and the new GHA, the Wainfleet brewery has a 3% abv Dark Mild that notches up respectable sales figures. As other brewers stopped producing mild, Batemans filled the gap and now sells healthy volumes of the beer in the free as well as the tied estate.

The second decade of the 21st century should be marked by a return to boy's bitter and mild ales. It will take critics of the brewing industry by surprise if the brewing industry switches from premium beers to low gravity ones.

I hereby announce the formation of the Campaign for Weak and Sensible Beers — Camweasel. You know it makes sense and the founding meeting will be lubricated by Welton's Pridenjoy and Batemans Dark Mild.