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Germany pubs

Cologne: not just about the Koelsch

freischems

We end up in Cologne so often these days  on our way in and out of Germany that it’s a struggle to find new pubs or beers to try. This time, however, we spotted an advert for Freischem’s Brauhaus on a free city map and trekked out of the immediate city centre in the rain to give it a go.

It was huge and mostly empty — because it was 4.30 on a wet Sunday afternoon or because it only opened a month or two ago? The beer list immediately had us a little excited. It included a Koelsch, of course, but also something called Trub, a weizen, a Christmas beer and a stout.

The Koelsch was of the slightly darker, honey-tasting variety (see also Paeffgen) and very pleasant. Trub was, unsurprisingly, a cloudy light beer — their answer to the bland brauhaus zwickl and perfectly drinkable, if unexciting. The weizen ticked all the usual boxes.

Weihnachtsbier was a nice red colour with a good spicy aroma. We were split on this one, though. Boak thought it was dull, verging on unpleasant, with an off yeast flavour and not much more. Bailey could taste roasted malt and liked the bitterness.

The stout was the stand-out beer, though. We really weren’t expecting much — a boring schwarzbier, perhaps? — but it had a good thick body, a creamy chocolate flavour and a great roasted bitter aftertaste. We’d have enjoyed this anywhere but, by German brewpub standards, it was a knockout.

Given that it wasn’t far away, we also staged a return visit to Hellers, where there were a couple of new beers for us to try as well as some old favourites. Winterbock was an amateur take on Aventinus, with all the right clove and fruit flavours but  with absolutely no condition. Pity, as this would be stunning otherwise. The new bottled Pils was very good — bitter, but not especially hoppy, and so malty it tasted like mashing grain.

Bottles of Hellers Wiess (the unfiltered Koelsch) are currently on sale at Cask, the excellent pub in Pimlico we wrote about here.

Categories
Germany Nice places to drink in...

I wish I was in Cologne

cologne1.jpgIt’s Shrove Tuesday (aka Pancake Day). I love pancakes, don’t get me wrong. But isn’t Shrove Tuesday in Britain a pretty tame celebration, compared to the multi-day benders that go on in many parts of the world?

The Rhineland goes in for carnivals in a big way. Whilst we were in Duesseldorf a few weeks back, we saw plenty of posters advertising the big events to come. The Cologne carnival is even more famous.

I wish I was in Cologne, drinking koelsch tonight.

And that reminds me — we haven’t posted our postscript to our trip to Duesseldorf — a brief round up of a couple more cheeky koelsches downed between train connections.

On the way out, it was a visit to the Gaffel brewery tap in the Alter Markt. Gaffel’s pleasant enough, particularly when it’s the first beer of the trip. However, more exciting was the fact that we saw the very waiter from the photo that illustrates the “Cologne and the Northwest” section of the Eyewitness Guide to beer.

On the way back, we thought we’d pop into the famous Frueh am Dom, which had always looked too touristy/busy to visit on previous trips. It being a wet Monday afternoon in January, there was plenty of room, even with all the businessmen and their suitcases, awaiting their train connections. It’s a nice place. The brew itself is a very clean, crisp koelsch, very refreshing but not one of the more interesting ones (in our humble opinions).

Highlight this time round was Peter’s Koelsch, from their outlet in the old town. We seemed to have missed this on our first crawl round Cologne. You can definitely taste the ale in this one — fruity and almost sulphurous. We liked it.

Notes

A map containing all of the places mentioned here and in our previous post can be found on Ron Pattinson’s European Beer Guide, here, which also has stacks of other interesting information. You can also follow this link for Ron Pattinson’s various koelsch crawls, all entertaining reads.

Boak

Categories
Germany

Does Koelsch taste any different from lager?

hellers.gifI’m ashamed to admit it, but for a long time, we couldn’t really see what the fuss about Koelsch was. I know it’s technically an ale, but I couldn’t taste it.

It probably didn’t help that the only examples we’d been able to try were several bottles of Meantime’s “Cologne Style Lager”, a pint (a pint!) of Kupper’s on tap, a bottle of Frueh, and a bottle of Dom. One was, clearly, not authentic, and the others had travelled a distance, and were reckoned to be among the blander examples, too.

So, we took advantage of our visit to Germany in the spring to answer the burning question once and for all: does Koelsch taste any different from lager?

The first Koelsch we had was on the way out to Bavaria, when we stopped off in Aachen for a night. Aachen isn’t a big beer town — they just don’t seem that interested — so the only Koelsch we found was Dom, which we drank at The Golden Swan. It was welcome as the first beer of our German trip, but wasn’t terribly exciting. It really did taste like any other lager.

The next day, we trekked down to Bavaria, where we spent almost two weeks drinking every type of beer we could get our hands on. I can only assume our taste-buds got more refined and more used to distinguishing subtle differences, because there was a magic moment in Nuremberg when we suddenly *understood* Koelsch.

Oddly enough, this happened while we were drinking a pilsner. Neumarkt Lammsbrau’s pils came in the standard pilsner stem glass. It looked like a standard pilsner. But the minute I put my nose in to take a sip, I was taken aback. “It smells slightly like an ale,” we both said, simultaneously. And it tasted a bit like an ale, too. Not a pint of London Pride, exactly, but somehow fruitier and riper than most lagers. “It’s like a Koelsch,” we agreed, and then little lightbulbs appeared over our heads. “So that’s it — that’s what a Koelsch tastes like.” We started to look forward to our imminent 24 hour stint in Cologne, on the way home.

cologne2.jpgIn the afternoon and evening we had there, we did nothing but hunt Koelsch, but this time, each one tasted different.

  • Reissdorf was distinctly fruity, with some wine-like flavours.
  • Pfaffen — a spin-off from Paffgen, the result of some kind of family feud — was noticeably dark and more bitter, and tasted very strongly of honey. Reminded me of Fuller’s much-maligned Honey Dew.
  • Paeffgen — a spin-off from Pfaffen, the result of some kind of family feud — was very similar, but lighter in colour and hoppier, reminiscent of an English summer ale.
  • Frueh, which had tasted more-or-less like Fosters when I drank it in London, also had strong fruit flavours, and was obviously an ale, although fizzier and tamer than some of the others we tried.
  • Dom, too, tasted noticeably like an ale, but still struck us as “middle-of-the-road”. Beautiful glasses and a very cool logo, though!

As night began to fall, we retreated to the student district, walking the streets looking at pubs for signs which would tell us which Koelsch they served. We ended up going to some very weird bars, just because they had one we wanted to try.

  • Gilden was light, spritzy without being fizzy, and had a subtle but distinct flavour of strawberries — it would make a great replacement for champagne at a beer-bore’s dinner party. Probably my favourite.
  • Gaffel was very like a pilsner, with no real ale flavours.
  • Sion was the dullest of them all — just like a helles, though perhaps drier.
  • We finished with a humdinger, though, at Heller’s brewpub on Roonstrasse. Their three beers were all interesting. The Koelsch was particularly special, tasting malty and rich, and reminiscent of toffee-apples. The unique “Wiess” (“veece”, not “vice”) was, in effect, the same beer but unfiltered. It tasted entirely different — apples, again, but this time with lemons, and a really obvious “ale” flavour, perhaps from all the swirling suspended yeast. Remarkable.

So, Koelsch isn’t just lager, but pasteurising, filtering and lagering soften out the ale flavours, and made them hard for us to spot. The fault wasn’t with the beer, as such, but with our ability to pick out subtle flavours, which is the downside of drinking crazily powerful IPAs, Imperial Stouts, ESBs and so on the rest of the time.

Boak