Manchester city centre is already blessed with a number of very fine pubs and alehouses: The Marble Arch, The Angel, Common, Bar Fringe, Knott Bar, The City Arms, The Crown and Kettle, The Bank, The Bull’s Head, and The Smithfield Hotel to name just the ones within walking distance of the tram that Jo and I drink in fairly regularly and I can remember off the top of my head.

Well, last Saturday Jo and I popped in for a couple of drinks at a newly opened establishment which I think already stands head-and-shoulders above the majority of the rest, and is surely set to be recognised as one of Manchester’s very finest: The Port Street Beer House. Here’s why:

First: the location. At the Piccadilly end of Manchester’s Northern Quarter, about 5 minutes walk from the tram stop in Piccadilly Gardens, it’s far enough off the beaten track to avoid attracting passing hoardes of alcopop-seeking teeny-boppers (is that the right technical term? I’m terribly out of touch these days). Perfect.

Next: the pub itself. From the highly polished wooden flooring (which is quite lovely) to the sophisticated decor, muted lighting, eclectic-yet-comfortable furnishings in the upstairs lounge and the light jazz playing softly in the background, it’s a very grown-up sort of space. Which is just the sort of space I like, seeing as I’m well over the hill and accelerating comfortably into middle-age. Again, perfect.

And finally, the beer selection. Oh, my word, the beer selection…

Five cask pumps, which on the night in question were offering beers (from left-to-right) by Dark Star, Acorn, BrewDog, Thornbridge and Prospect. Another ten or so keg taps; two more BrewDog, a couple of continental (Czech or German, I think) lagers, one American guest and some others I failed to make note of. And then a couple of six-foot fridges half full of bottled delights from the UK, Europe, the US and probably Asia and Australia as well, with another two pallet-loads en route, so I was told. To be fair I will say that some of the bottles in question sounded like they were a little bit on the pricey side. But then, quality costs, you tend to get what you pay for and we really are talking about the sort of beers that you definitely aren’t likely to see in many other places outside of their country of origin (again I forgot to note down specific examples, so I’ll make a quick list next time I’m in). Caveat emptor if you’re picking stuff from the fridges at random, is all I’m saying.

Anyhow, the first pint of the evening for me: Thornbridge Hark. A light, session strength golden ale, with bags of hoppy freshness up front and then a long, dry, biscuity finish. Very drinkable, quite moreish, easily the sort of ale you could stick with all night. Meanwhile, Jo tried a half of Dark Star M&M Special Porter. This 6.5% ABV, dark, rich porter was massively smoky and spicy (chorizo!) with sweeter liquorice to follow. Maybe a bit of a challenging flavour profile, but if smoked beers are to your taste then this one is definitely worth trying.

Next up, I chatted to one of the chaps behind the bar about just how bloody marvellous it was to see Brewdog Hardcore on draught and as a result ended up with a half from the keg. In bottles, this 9.2% ABV imperial IPA is pretty damn amazing. On draught it’s… just awesome. All the burnt-orange citrus flavour, dry hop bite and incredible tropical-fruit aroma of the regular version, but with a silkier, richer mouth-feel. Quite splendid. Jo meanwhile had gone for a freshly-tapped cask ale: Prospect one-twenty. At 4.0% ABV, this light malty ale with a dry, biscuity finish and a slight orange-citrus tang (think orange shortbread, but not at all sugary) was another excellent session choice. Jo said she could quite happily drink this all night and wouldn’t have complained if it was the only cask beer on.

At this point, I decided to step away from the monster IPA and renew my acquaintance with an old favourite: Acorn Gorlovka. This 6.0% ABV stout is smooth, dry and packed full of delicious flavour: high-cocoa milk chocolate (think Green & Blacks), with a lingering roast-malt finish and a faint coffee bitterness giving it a distinctly mocha profile overall. Very, very good indeed. And at this point in the proceedings, I brought Jo a half of Left Hand JuJu Ginger. Jo likes a good ginger beer, but this one turned out to be not quite gingery enough. It was cucumber-fresh and not too sugary (which is a good thing), with a tangy, lemony after-taste, but the ginger did’t linger (which is a bad thing…) and by the end of the half it was a case of lemon, lemon and more lemon. “Lukewarm lemon tea”, Jo concluded, and went back to the Prospect one-twenty for the rest of the evening.

I blame my early-doors dalliance with Hardcore for what happened next: a pint of smooth, hoppy, malty and delicious BrewDog Punk IPA – again, imagine the bottled version, but then add a good 50% to the quality of the mouth-feel. It was cask rather than keg and I have no idea whether it was old-recipe Punk or new-recipe Punk, but whatever the case, it was high-quality stuff and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Then I went for a pint of BrewDog Zeitgeist – their Czech-style black lager. 4.9% ABV, packed with burnt coffee flavours and possessed of an incredibly refreshing hoppy bite. Lovely stuff once more and I was very glad indeed that I’d been able to try three BrewDog favourites on draught, be they cask or keg, old recipe or new, they were all very, very good indeed. Then there was one more half of Gorlovka for the road and then Jo and I called it a night – a truly excellent night – and headed for the tram back home.

So, what do I think of Manchester’s newest specialist beer emporium? Frankly, I absolutely love the place. I’ll be closely following developments on the Port Street Beer House blog and keeping an eye out for new beers announced via their Twitter account. And whilst I’m sure Jo and I will still frequent our other favourite drinking places on a regular basis, if our visits don’t more usually turn into stops en-route to an end-of-the-evening session at the Port Street Beer House, I’ll be quite surprised.

Brewery: Guinness
Location: Dublin, Rep. of Ireland
Style: Black lager
ABV: 4.5%
Version: Bottled

Guinness have had mixed success with experimenting on variations of their famous stout, with probably more misses than hits. With this new 4.5% Black Lager, currently undergoing a trial period in Northern Ireland and Malaysia, they are looking to attract the younger lager drinker to the brand, giving them the flavour without the heaviness. Priced at £1.25 for a 330ml bottle it’s at the lower price bracket for those of us used to paying premium prices for our beer, but to me it still seems a bit on the expensive side for the average lager drinker used to “stack-em-high” supermarket deals. The draught version likely competes better but I’ve not had a chance to sample that version of it yet. And other than write-ups in various newspapers, such as this good one on the Times Online website, there hasn’t exactly been a high profile marketing campaign (or maybe because I don’t read local newspapers or watch much local TV I just haven’t seen any of it).

So how does the product rate? Well, it’s a black lager so it is, unsurprisingly, black in colour with a lot of fizz, and very watery looking with no head. There’s very little aroma as well, some faint coffee and chocolate maltiness lingering in the background, but then the average lager drinker probably doesn’t pay any attention to such things. So not off to a good start so far, and to be honest, the taste is the disappointment I was expecting as well – not much to it, with a very thin and chewy texture, but not in a good way. It’s also very dry, which I could see putting off a lot of their target market. I’m struggling to find anything positive about this beer, it’s below average for a black lager, I see no reason for it’s existence and it fully deserves to go the way of previous failures. But that’s only my opinion, what do I know, it’ll probably go on to be a roaring success. Although a couple of reviewers over at Beer Advocate do seem to agree with me.le:

Brewery: Cervejarias Kaiser Brasil (?)
Location: Brazil
ABV: 4.6%
Version: Bottled
Source: Tesco

I’m not 100% of the provenance of this one. Based on the website at www.amazonbeer.com it looks like Xingu is brewed by Cervejarias Kaiser in Brazil, but the site hasn’t been updated for a few years so it might have moved elsewhere (there’s a new website under production at www.xingubeer.com which might shed some more light). In any case, I picked a bottle up from the World Beer section of my local Tesco, on the grounds that it looked interesting and you can’t really go far wrong with a decent black lager.

Xingu turned out to be unlike any of the black lagers I’d tried recently (BrewDog Zeitgeist, Herold Bohemian, Bernard Special Dark), but unfortunately not in a particularly good way…

Xingu poured nicely: an opaque black with a light head but from the first sup onwards it was sweetness all the way. There was a hint of herbs and honey, but it was mostly sugar that dominated, without even the burnt-toffee taste of treacle to harden the edges. As I understand it, most black lagers use roasted barley malt to give the beer its dark colouring. I think Xingu must use molasses instead. Or some other local sweetener (apparently it’s brewed to a Brazilian recipe). In the final analysis Xingu wasn’t undrinkable, but it was just too sweet for my palate – I definitely won’t be rushing back any time soon.

Today marks the official launch of the latest addition to the BrewDog range: Zeitgeist. The beer is a 4.9% black lager in the classic Czech tradition and is packaged in bottles that are graced with some of the most sinister-looking sheep-human hybrids you’re ever likely to clap eyes on (although come to think of it, could a sheep-human hybrid ever be anything but sinister..?) courtesy of Scottish art student Heather Brennan.

Brewdog are marking the birth of the new beer with a launch event in London and a press release, issued yesterday, included a snippet from yours truly’s tasting notes, which was nice. Although even nicer was the case of Zeitgeist that the BrewDog crew sent along as a thank you. Cheers, BrewDog! I know what I’ll be drinking this coming Friday…

Speaking of which, it’ll be interesting to see if I can detect any marked differences between the prototype and the mass-produced version. Alas, I quaffed my two spare bottles of the proto a few weeks back as I wasn’t sure of the expiry date, so I’ll have to compare from memory.

Here’s the aforementioned press release, for those interested in more information, and you’ll be able to get more from www.zeitgeistbeer.com (once the finishing touches have been put to the site) and of course there’s the BrewDog blog to keep an eye on as well.

BLACK IS BETTER AND BLACK IS BACK! BrewDog, the globally successful edgy beer company have created the UK’s first mass-market black lager.

Zeitgeist brings to Britain a 4.9% ABV all-natural ingredients black lager that is set to tantalise those who sup its dark flavours, which include hints of chocolate and coffee.

It may seem an unusual colour for a lager, but according to BrewDog MD James Watt, it is the original colour of all lagers.

He said: “At BrewDog we’ve been looking to bring beers full of natural ingredients to the masses – and now we’re doing that with lager as lager used to be. We’re saying people have had enough of additive-fuelled bubbly nonsense.

“Zeitgeist is an idiosyncratic, alternative black lager. It seeks to recreate the spirit, attitude and autonomy of an age gone by. Its inspiration is found more than 200 years ago. It takes an age-old classic, a forgotten masterpiece and gives it relevance and an avant-garde edge.

“Originally, before the advent of modern pale malting technology, all lagers were black. Progress is not always a good thing. We want to wake up people’s tastebuds with this, let them discover the joys of a real, proper lager.”

BrewDog have taken the beer world by storm in just two years with controversial offerings like Speedball, Tokyo, Punk IPA and Trashy Blonde but are a global success with the USA and Sweden being amongst the countries lining up to buy 120,000 bottles of beer a month. In the UK, Brewdog beers can be found in Tesco, Asda, Oddbins and many other retailers.

Zeitgeist is full of contradictions with its black colour and light flavour and takes inspiration from classic Czech dark lagers to create a highly drinkable lager that is set to be a hit with lager fans, new and old alike.

Available to On Trade in bottles, casks and kegs and the Off Trade in bottles (as well as online via www.zeitgeistbeer.com) this is a chance for people fed up with artificially frothy, bland bubbly lagers to try the real deal.

Fermented at 10 degrees with a lager strain of yeast and hopped with Cascade and Ahtanum, American hops with citrus and spicy notes, Zeitgeist is light in flavour with hints of chocolate and coffee and a fruity twist, making it a lager for both sexes.

Zeitgeist’s edgy attitude extends past that of the name and taste. The bottle’s unique look was created by Scottish art student Heather Brennan, who took her inspiration from what she sees as being today’s zeitgeist.

Heather was picked to be the designer of Zeitgeist after BrewDog ran a competition with art students, giving them the chance to design the logo and look of the new drink.

Heather said: “I looked at what Zeitgeist means in contemporary times from an alternative view. The label represents conformity in today’s society, as people follow the higher authority.

“This sparked my interest in military line-ups and the repressing of their identity in masks and uniform. I’ve tried to emulate this with sheep masks, yet the body shapes reveal personality underneath.

“My influences were from a variety of sources for this project, from artists work, such as Alex Pardee’s linework and Ralph Steadmans’ use of ink, to films such as Metropolis and 1984, anything set in a dystopian landscape.”

And to counter the theme of conformity, the website behind Zeitgeist (www.zeitgeistbeer.com) is the opposite: anyone buying a pack of four Zeitgeists will receive a code for a special website where they can go in and create/upload anything they want, encouraging their creativity. The lager is also online at www.twitter.com/zeitgeist_beer.

The drink has already been a hit online after BrewDog gave beer and lager fans the chance to sample it with beer writers and bloggers like Evan Rail and Darren Turpin praising it.

Darren said online: “Zeitgeist is quite delicious and intense…. I reckon I could happily sit through a session on this one. I found it more flavoursome than Herold and a lot more interesting than Leffe Brun – the other dark lager I’m best acquainted with.”

Zeitgeist will be launched tomorrow evening, Thursday February 26, in London’s Austin Gallery at an exhibition of Heather’s work.

Right then, one last 2008 round-up piece. And then it’s a slight change of direction for me in 2009.

As I mentioned at the start of my first 2008 ‘rest of’ post, I went a bit mad last year in an effort to try one of everything I could possibly find in the local supermarkets and in any off-licenses I happened to be passing. As a result I’ve found myself enjoying some truly fantastic beers, but also sampling rather a lot that fell into the ‘take it or leave it’ category: not quite distinctive or impressive enough to be worth making the effort to buy on a regular basis. And I also had one or two that were just bloody awful, but thankfully they were few and far between.

So anyway, in 2009 I’m going to try to focus on seeking out the best examples of those styles of beer that I know I’ve particularly enjoyed to-date: stout, porter, strong ale, dark ale, black lager and IPA. I’m going to try to avoid sampling endless variations on the light ale / pale ale / summer ale / best bitter theme just for the sake of it, unless they seem particularly interesting. Or at least, that’s the plan, anyway.

But for now, on with that round-up:

Brakspear Oxford Gold (4.8% abv, bottled)
Tried this one as part of a trio of organic beers, along with the Whitstable Bay (see previous post) and the Duchy Select (below). This one was a full-flavoured golden ale with a light, fresh aroma and a hoppy flavour. Very nice indeed.

Duchy Originals Organic Select Ale (6.2% abv, bottled)
This strong ale from HRH’s organic range pours a lovely dark red and has a tangy, sweet flavour with plenty of toffee and malt notes to savour. According to the website, it gets its full-bodied, complex flavours from a mix of organic hops and organic Plumage Archer barley malt organic rye and oats added. Whatever they put in the stuff, it works quite nicely indeed: well worth tracking down a bottle or two and I might re-visit myself before too long, it’s usually on the shelf in my local Sainsbury’s.

St Peter’s Amarillo Ale (4.8% abv, bottled)
Picked this one up as part of the Sainsbury’s summer ales promotion (there’s no info on the St Peter’s website, so it may have been a limited bottling for the promo). Amercian Amarillo hops give this beer a cloudy, ginger-beer colour and a huge aroma of citrus and spice. The flavour is big as well: slightly sweet and spicy with more ginger and lemon; rather like a wheat beer, all things considered.

Highgate Old Ale (5.3% abv, bottled)
Highgate Old Ember was one of my very favourite beers and a regular in the cupboard until about a year ago, when it seemed to disappear from the shelves.I’ve been keeping an eye out for it ever since and I was rather hoping that it had been re-branded as Old Ale… but it turns out they’re different brews (Old Ember is 6.5% to Old Ale’s 5.3). Old Ale is almost as dark Old Ember and its rich mouth-feel, malty sweetness and liquorice-bitterness make it one well worth trying, but somehow it just isn’t quite the same… my search goes on.

Davenport’s Original Bitter (4.0% abv, bottled)
As far as I can make out this one used to be a West Midlands staple, available pretty much everywhere in the region, but these days it’s brewed in smaller quantities by Highgate. And I’m afraid it was nothing special, to be honest: a light amber colour with a faint hoppy aroma, a slight bitterness and just a hint of citrus. One of those take it or leave it brews I mentioned at the top of the post.

Doctor Okell’s IPA
One of the winners of the Sainsbury’s promo (personally I was rooting for Red Rat’s Crazy Dog Stout, but there you go). Very lager-like to begin with, it warmed up to a reasonably hoppy light ale, but it wasn’t really anywhere near hoppy enough or strong enough for a proper IPA. Mind you, judging by the beer catalogue on the Okell’s website (which is rather excellent, you should definitely give it a visit) they don’t actually produce a beer over 4.8% abv (the traditional porter, which I would like to try), so perhaps it’s against their mission statement or something..?

Durham Brewery St Cuthbert (6.5% abv, bottled)
This was the last of the batch of bottles that I bought from The Vineyard in Belfast. It poured with a great deal of hiss and fizz but settled down to a lightly effervescent ale characterised by a rich, nutty flavour with hints of toasted bread. Not the best beer of this strength that I’ve tried to-date and not one I’d rush back to, but not too bad, all things considered.

Ridgeway High & Mighty Beer of the Gods (4.5% abv, bottled)
Another one from the Sainsbury’s summer promotion, High and Mighty Beer of the Gods is from Peter Scholey’s virtual or ‘cuckoo’ brewery (which means it’s brewed under contract by another brewery). The label proclaims it a British variant on a classic American over-hopped style, but I actually got more chocolate and malt from the initial flavour, with the hops kicking in on the after-taste. Overall though it was quite sharp, hoppy and generally very pleasant indeed.

Bath Ales Barnstormer (4.5% abv, bottled)
The other winner of the Sainsbury’s competition and a rather more deserved one than the Okell’s IPA (in my humble, etc.) This one was a rather fine chestnut-brown ale with a rich, roasted-malt nose and a nutty, chocolatey, biscuity flavour. A dried-fruit sweetness develops as the drink goes on, making for a well-rounded ale that’s very pleasant indeed.

Arundel Prize Fighter (4.6% abv, bottled) This one (yet another from the Sainsbury’s summer ale promotion) had a lovely, malty, chocolatey nose in the bottle and the malt carried through to the flavour, along with a sharp tang. A pleasant mouth-feel with a slight fizz and a warming sensation on the tongue made for a very tasty, very enjoyable bitter.

Bernard Special Dark Beer (5.1% abv, bottled)
An unpasteurised (microfiltered instead) Czech black lager that’s very dark indeed and quite tasty with it. Smooth and drinkable, with a faint tang of liquorice. Similar in character to the Herold Bohemian and BrewDog Zeit Geist I tried earlier in the year.

Hopback Summer Lightning (5.0% abv, bottled)
I have it on very good authority indeed (via my mate Andy) that this is an excellent draught session beer, just so long as you don’t actually plan on walking too far (or, in fact, anywhere) afterwards. In bottled form it was still pretty darn good: a pale golden colour, slightly honeyed to begin with, but a dry, bitter bite kicks in before too long to ensure that the overall effect is a nicely balanced, easy-drinking ale that I’m definitely going to have a couple of pints of on draught the very next chance I get. Definitely.

Right then, that’s enough rounding-up for now, although in future I might do a catch-up once a month or so just to keep things moving along. Back to the main Tasting Notes for me.

Brewery: BrewDog
Location: Fraserburgh, Scotland
ABV: Various (see below)
Version: Bottled, prototype
Source: BrewDog mail order

A few weeks back I placed an order for a mixed case of independent Scottish brewery BrewDog’s Rip Tide Stout and Paradox Stout, partly to show my support for the brewery in their battle with the Portman Group, partly because I’m on something of a mission to find my perfect stout and I reckon these two could very well be contenders. Almost on a whim, I decided to order a case of BrewDog’s 2009 prototypes as well and this is the selection that arrived a few days later:

Yesterday evening I finally got around to sorting out a sampling session (it would have been sooner, but a bout of food poisoning and then a weekend away put paid to that) and here’s what I discovered:

BrewDog Bad Pixie Wheat Beer (4.7% abv)

First up was Bad Pixie, a wheat beer brewed with juniper and lemon zest to 4.7% abv (which, let’s face it, is quite reserved and sedate for a BrewDog beer). I have to confess that I approached this one with mild trepidation: I have something of a gluten intolerance and whilst not out-and-out allergic, have usually shied away from anything too overtly wheat-based. Plus, Hoegaarden and I did not get on at all well, the one time I ventured there, so all-in-all, I can’t say I was actively looking forward to this one…

Which is probably why I was pleasantly surprised when I cracked open the bottle and poured – the beer was a very pale, very golden colour (see photo, utilising my trusty Leffe balloon goblet) and not at all the murky, cloudy affair I was half-expecting. Aroma-wise there was a light fruitiness, although I had trouble pinning down the specifics. Mouth-feel was good and the flavour was, again, faintly fruity – the juniper and lemon, I assumed – and quite bitter. As the drink went on it developed a distinct dryness which came to dominate, along with a lingering after-taste of… brie. No, seriously. And I think it might have been blue brie at that.

In conclusion: I thought Bad Pixie was a bit of an odd one. Not as unpleasant an experience as I initially feared it might be, but definitely not my cup of tea, either. As I say, I’m no expert on the wheat beer style, so I don’t know how if shapes up to other examples, but any beer with an after-taste of cheese would have to give me pause for thought in future.

Brewdog Zeit Geist Black Lager (5.1% abv)

Zeit Geist is a black lager which “takes inspiration from the Czech classics” and indeed, it reminded me very much indeed of the Herold Bohemian that I sampled a few weeks ago.

As you can see from the photo, it poured a lovely ebony colour (although with ruby highlights that you can’t quite make out here) but that thick, frothy cream head disappeared in pretty short order. The aroma was smoky and spicy on the nose and the first sip provided a big hit of liquorice, which eventually settled down to something deeper, sweeter and fruitier. Jo suggested dried fruit and after thinking about it for a bit I came up with “barbecued raisins”, which makes no sense whatsoever but seemed to sum up the flavour quite nicely. There was a hint of muscovadot sugar in there as well, which made me think of dark rum, and I expected to find a few coffee tones, but they weren’t as obvious as I thought they might have been.

In conclusion: Zeit Geist is quite delicious and intense, but at the same time extremely more-ish. I reckon I could happily sit through a session on this one. I found it more flavoursome than the Herold and a lot more interesting than Leffe Brun – the other dark lager I’m best acquainted with. So, yes, if this one was produced on a larger scale then I’d definitely be interested.

BrewDog Chaos Theory IPA (7.1% ABV)

Described as “a deep copper IPA with insane hops”, Chaos Theory really is a monster of a beer. The first thing you notice is its quite lovely colouring, which – as you can just about make out from the photo – lies somewhere between the advertised copper and a stronger ruby red. But it’s the nose that really leaves a big impression: this beer has an absolutely incredible aroma, an immense fruity tang that really slaps you around the head when you take that first deep sniff and keeps on doing so right to the bottom of the glass.

Taste-wise, Chaos Theory is just as intense. A big slosh of alcohol is followed up by some incredibly complex sweet & sour fruit flavours: raspberries, stewed plums, bitter oranges, mangoes and more, all carried along by a gloriously rich mouth-feel and with a smoothness of finish that belies its strength and power.

In conclusion: Chaos Theory is one is a hell of a beer, and no mistake. A relentless onslaught of flavour upon flavour, it’s definitely a sipper rather than a session beer and certainly not one for the faint-hearted. And this is the one was the eventual winner of the 2009 Prototype Challenge, has since gone into production and is available to buy from BrewDog.

To summarise, then: Bad Pixie wasn’t for me, but it certainly wasn’t awful. Chaos Theory is an incredible, huge beer that could give Meantime IPA a run for its money (although along a slightly different track) but I’m really not sure I could drink more than a glass or so at a time.

Instead, it was Zeit Geist that proved the overall winner for me. An interesting, tasty, highly-enjoyable variant on a style of beer that BrewDog haven’t already brewed en masse, I rather wish that they’d decided to put this one into production instead of Chaos Theory. Not because Chaos Theory isn’t a bloody good beer, but they already have their rather fantastic Punk IPA on the roster, so it seems a shame not to broaden their product base with something a little different. But maybe they’ll relent and brew a batch or two of Zeit Geist in 2009 anyhow. In which case, they can be assured of an order from me.

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.

Brewery: Herold
Location: Breznice, Czech Republic
ABV: 5.3%
Version: Bottled
Source: Tesco

I’m not much of a lager drinker, but I’m by no means immune to the charms of a good dark or black lager, so Herold’s Bohemian Black seemed like a good bet when I spotted it on the shelves in the Tesco World Beers section. I drank it on Saturday night whilst watching Pirates of the Caribbean III, it being the closest thing in the cupboard to a tipple of dark rum (without actually drinking the bottle of dark rum that’s been lurking in the corner for about seven or eight years now…)

According to the website, Herold Bohemian Black is “a classic lager of Schwarzbier style, brewed from 4 malts and lagered for up to 10 weeks”. It certainly lives up to its colour-promise, pouring a lovely ebony, although the “dense, creamy head” promised on the neck label must only be available on draught, as here it was more of a muddy brown soap-scum effect, that soon dissipated.

The taste was much more impressive: a rich, chocolatey, liquorice-and-herbs flavour, buoyed along by a pleasantly dense mouthfeel. A hint of molasses sweetness as well, but with a tangy bite that stopped it becoming too syrupy. I had chilled the bottle for 40 minutes or so prior to opening, and once the beer warmed it released more of its smokiness as well, so maybe cellar (or cupboard) temperature would have been better.

Not necessarily one I’d seek out again, but if I saw it on offer then I might be tempted to grab a few bottles to feed to any visiting lager-drinkers too timid to move on to a pale ale. Anything’s worth a try, right?