Furious liquor store bosses blasted their suppliers for selling them beer more than a year past its sell-by date.

Staff at Haywood's in Warwick were stunned when they discovered a massive delivery of 200 cases of beer was mostly out of date.

And manager Mr. Marcus Williams vowed that the firm would be changing their suppliers in protest at the error.

He said: "We sell a lot of beer -- probably more than anywhere else in the Island. It never sits on the shelf for long, so it's always fresh.

"We were absolutely shocked when we found out. If there is even a suspicion beer isn't right it's out of here.

"We don't want our customers to even think we might sell them anything but the very best.'' Sharp-eyed staff at the store spotted out-of-date bottles among a huge consignment of nearly 5000 bottles only days after it was delivered to the store from Gosling's warehouse.

Mr. Williams said: "Luckily, we had only sold maybe six or a dozen bottles before it was noticed, so very little of it got into the hands of the public.'' Angry staff immediately contacted suppliers Gosling Brothers after the problem was noticed and demanded that they send a truck round to collect the beer, which has now been destroyed.

The out-of-date consignment included cases of St. Pauli Girl, Amstel Gold, Miller and Miller Lite. Some of the bottles had an expiry date of October last year, while other cases went out-of-date earlier this year.

Mr. Williams said: "Our attitude now is that we are going to use other suppliers where we can because there is a loss of faith and a loss of trust now.'' He added that the consignment probably included some beer which was fit for sale -- but that his staff did not have time to check every case.

And he said: "We shouldn't have to check anything.

We have a right to expect the best. For people to make mistakes like that is terrible, especially when we do so much business with them.

"And once we had found out some of it was past its date, we weren't interested in looking at any of it -- we just wanted it out of the store.'' "I can't understand how a warehouse could make a mistake like that. The bottom line is the potential damage they could have done to our business by selling us bad beer and the impact it could have had on our customers. Some of the bottles you could hold up to the light and see it was cloudy inside.'' A red-faced spokesman for Gosling Brothers apologised for the blunder and admitted that warehouse staff had made a mistake.

He said the beer delivered to Hayward's had been put aside for dumping -- but that it had been loaded on to a delivery truck instead.

The spokesman added: "It came from the wrong stack. We load from a loading dock and we had put this stuff aside. Unfortunately there was a mistake.''