Usually if a friend leads me to pub shining with acres of chrome and glass, a huge screen displaying a couple of dozen men kicking a ball around a field, and ‘architectural features’ like exposed steels and pipework, I’d be more inclined to politely decline and head off to the nearest boozer for a pint of Abbot.  However, last Saturday – 15th of November – my opinion of at least one chain of such pubs changed forever.

I was in Cardiff to watch Motorhead.  The natural thing to do before a Motorhead gig is to drink a few pints to numb your senses a little, lest they be permanently damaged come the onslaught of noise later in the evening.  Excuse thusly made, my mate Gareth and I embarked upon a little tour of Cardiff.  “Have you heard about Zero Degrees?” he asked.  After I replied in the negative, he took me to a splendid pub.  Very splendid.

This is Zero Degrees.  There’s lots to like about this place, once you get past the clinical, dare-I-say trendy look of the pub itself.  Actually, it calls itself a restaurant, but any restaurant dominated by the sights and sounds of a working micro-brewery – and the place is built around the brewery, not the other way around – is a pub in my book.  And the main thing to like (after the beer, but I’m getting there) is the staff.  When we approached the bar and asked what beers they served, the barmaid gave us a detailed run-down of their brews.  And it wasn’t a by-the-numbers speech … you had the feeling that she really knew what she was on about. Then she offered us a taste of each of the beers on offer so that we could decide which to go with first.

We drank halves … it was to be a long day, and we wanted to do our best to try all 5 brews they had on offer.  And they were interesting, to say the least …

The first I went with was their Black Lager.  This really was black, and it tasted much more like a good heavy stout to me (I’d love to see an habitual Fosters drinker ordering and tackling a pint of this).  Dark, heavy, the flavour was very intense … the dense malts gave a rich coffee flavour, with a chocolate aftertaste that was very pleasant.

Next, their speciality beer, which at the time was a mango-based ale, brewed with crushed and diced mangoes no less!  A strange one this, because it looked very pale and cloudy, smelled like a fruit-based alco-pop, but it tasted divine.  Sweet, but not too sweet, the strength came through very nicely, and the fruitiness, though overt, was certainly not overpowering.  I could have done without the slice of orange the barman popped in (what was that all about?), but an interesting and experimental brew that I’d certainly track own again.

I also tried their wheat beer, and though I don’t usually go for these, I found it very palatable.

Something that struck me here was the intensity of the tastes.  This definitely isn’t the sort of place where you’d go for a big session, because drinking in halves was just right to get the most out of these flavours. I think if I’d had a pint of the Black Lager to begin with, I might have been put off trying something else.

And something else for which I offer high marks: they’re true experimenters.  Evidence of this?  The mango beer worked surprisingly well.

So hats off to Zero Degrees.  It’s a trendy, upmarket pub and restaurant, but at the same time it’s a dedicated micro-brewery, trying to draw people in and give them something of an education in the type of ale they should be drinking, whilst pretending to be a pizza restaurant at the same time (actually that’s a bit unfair, I’m sure their pizzas are fantastic … but you can see where my interests lie).

If only that could be said of the gig venue … Tetley’s from a  can.  Please.