BrewDog

31 Westgate Street, Cardiff [map]

Next stop, BrewDog - a bar so hipstery you're only allowed in if you're sporting a waxed moustache and a pair of tweed breeches, while riding a fixed-gear unicycle.

Fortunately, it's a look The Photographer has recently adopted (and, in fact, pulls off with some aplomb), so we make it through the door without incident.

Most of the drinks here are produced by BrewDog - "Beer for punks", as they put it - so it's more Five AM Red Ale (at £4.55 a pint, no less) than Foster's.

A lot of their stuff is in the six to seven per cent range and only comes in half or two-thirds of a pint measures. Something to do, we presume, with encouraging drinkers to appreciate the flavour and quality of the grog as opposed to simply downing industrial quantities of cheap, tasteless lager.

It'll never catch on.

On the plus side, the place does attract a slightly higher class of clientele than, say, the 'Spoons down the road. Indeed, just out of shot is Alain de Botton who, we learn, is particularly partial to a Shipwrecker Circus.

This booth isn't actually that big - it's just that those two men are very, very small.

 

Downstairs is this little nook, housing a sofa and a Nintendo 64 - although the Mario Karting was temporarily put to a stop recently when the TV blew up.

Urban Tap House

25 Westgate Street, Cardiff [map]

Stumble up Womanby Street these days and, before you reach the assorted pleasures of The Gatekeeper and Dempseys, there's beer-and-burgers emporium Urban Tap House.

It was opened in September by Newport microbrewery Tiny Rebel and, as the signage suggests, it's very much from the craft-beer-as-hipster-accessory school.

As you can see, The Photographer's camera - such as it is - doesn't cope well with bright lights. But we forge ahead nonetheless. We are, after all, professionals. (Aside: we're not.)

There's none of yer Carlings and Carlsbergs here. It's all Camden Hells Lager, Dortmunder Union Vier and, er, Dirty Stop Out.

Which is both a delicious smoked oat stout and a harsh-but-fair appraisal of what happens when you drink, let's say for the sake of argument, nine pints of the stuff on an empty stomach. Not that we'd know anything about that sort of thing, you understand.

It's in the same premises as Fire Island (above) used to be. Tiled bar aside, Urban Tap House is, in many ways, very similar to its predecessor - albeit without debts of £1.2m.

There's some sort of cask ales thing going on during our visit, which takes us well out of our comfort zone - who can even guess at what Buxton American Rye entails? But when we discover they're all going for £2.50 a pint, it seems churlish not to get involved.

We may be many things but churlish isn't one of them.

This is one of those arcade machines that houses loads of retro classics, including Space Invaders - here being played absolutely appallingly. The trick, apparently, is to take out the columns of aliens at the ends first.

More tips on 35-year-old videogames coming soon.

Round the side of the bar and you've got these little diner-style booths. Turns out they're not that easy to manoeuvre into following the consumption of a miscellany of cask ales and nine pints of Dirty Stop Out.

Pica Pica

15-23 Westgate Street, Cardiff [map]


This is not, to be fair, the most alluring of facades.

Really, Cardiff just doesn't lend itself to the sort of continental tables-on-the-pavement-framed-by-casually-abandoned-scooters vibe that Pica Pica is going for.

Still, it flogs beer and that's good enough for us… we shrugged in a somewhat Gallic fashion.


To the bar. And ye gods: the horror, the horror. Or, more pertinently: the prices, the prices.

It's so expensive here that it's enough to make you abandon the whole concept of drinking booze altogether in favour of just going home and having a nice cup of tea instead.

The tariff is so steep it's almost vertical. A pint of lager is - brace yourselves - £4.20. But then, covering the front of your bar in acres of mosaic tiling doesn't come cheap.


The Photographer's cameraphone is on the blink, so these shots are imbued with an underlying note of sadness and regret.


There's a bit more action round by the second bar on the right-hand side.

Have we inadvertently stumbled upon a phalanx of actual young people having fun? Or are they, like us, just sitting around grumbling about the bar prices?

It's so hard to tell these days.

The Gatekeeper

9-10 Westgate Street, Cardiff [map]


Another one of the gazillion Wetherspoons that litter the centre of Cardiff.

The management should be proud of the heavy foot traffic, less so of the fact that a high proportion of it appears to be made up of children.


Now then, either that's a toddler at the bar or a Mexican midget wrestler without his mask.

And, quite frankly, it's unlikely to be the latter as they all seem to be getting bumped off by fake prostitutes who spike their drinks. Well, according to Metro, at least.


This is more like it. Real men, with polo shirts tucked into their jeans, ordering pints. It's what the Wetherspoon experience is all about.


But for all the cheap beer and cheap food, there's something utterly dismal about the place.

Stay here for more than a couple of rounds and being drugged by a Mexican vice girl suddenly becomes an attractive proposition.


It had to happen sooner or later. If you take enough random snapshots inside enough Cardiff pubs, one of them will inevitably feature MC Ninjah.

Spending all day playing the drums on bins in the centre of town is clearly thirsty - if not entirely lucrative - work.

Zero Degrees

27 Westgate Street, Cardiff [map]


This is one of four branches of the micro brewery's micro-chain. The other three bars under the Zero Degrees banner are in Bristol, Reading and London. (Just imagine what a depressing experience a night out in Reading must be.)

All the beers are brewed on-site, so there's none of your generic Foster's/Carling/Kronenbourg malarkey here. Instead, you've got a choice of such literally-named pints as Wheat Ale, Black Lager and Pilsner. All of which are eminently drinkable and pleasantly lacking in the belch-inducing fizz of branded lagers.

Pale Ale is our preference, although there's a rotating selection of seasonal beers too. The bar staff will readily offer you samples.


The utilitarian look neatly integrates the tanks and pipes used in the brewing process. We've been here a few times now - there aren't usually this many suits in the place.


Don't be fooled by those sofas on the right: they're not very comfortable. And the way they're laid out means that you often end up with someone sitting mere inches behind you, which is mildly disconcerting.

About a third of the floor-space is given over to an informal dining section (there's also a separate restaurant area upstairs), with the rest of the place dedicated to pure drinking. Eating is cheating, after all.

Queen's Vaults

29 Westgate Street, Cardiff [map]


While much of this part of Westgate Street is being taken over by trendy bars of varying quality, the Queen's Vaults remains resolutely old school.


It's basically just a big drinking warehouse. It's not always this blurry, by the way - we'd had a few pints by this point.


If the promise of booze alone isn't enough to keep you occupied, there's a trio of pool tables, making this one of the few pubs in the centre of town in which you can kid yourself that you've got the cueing skills of Stephen Hendry (even if Stephen Hawking would be a more accurate comparison).

There's also a poker table and a really bizarre coin-op called Big Buck Hunter Pro, a depressing gun game that simulates the experience of sneaking up on deer and then shooting them in the head. It is, not surprisingly, big in America.


The food is terrifyingly cheap (a rump steak will set you back £4.75) but you don't come here to eat. With all those games on offer, the Queen's Vaults is basically a Wetherspoons with pub Olympics.

Crunch

31 Westgate Street, Cardiff [map]


Given that it's open until 3am on Fridays and Saturdays, this is as much a boutique (ie tiny) club as it is bar. We were there at about 8pm on a Saturday and there was little evidence of what would compel someone to stay till the early hours.


Its cooler-than-thou vibe, and ill-advised attempt to replicate some sort of Soho media hangout, feels completely out of place on Westgate Street. The try-hard disposition is compounded by the huge windows, which mean that wherever you sit you're made to feel like a mannequin in a shop window.


The retro-future moulded plastic furniture is all very Habitat, while the knobbly floor reminds us of nothing so much as the non-slip tiles you get in public swimming pools.


In recent years, the same site has been home to both Boudoir and, before that, La Tantra - which suggests that the place is still desperately trying to carve an identity worth hanging on to. On the strength of Crunch, it's yet to succeed.