Crazy for Kölsch

Think of Americans in Germany and beer, and you'd probably think of package holiday makers braving the sloshed masses at Munich's Oktoberfest.

But a local Cologne newspaper, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, is reporting increasing numbers of US tourists haunting the city's bars with copies of The New York Times in their hands -- this after the Times travel section ran a piece raving about the local beer, Kölsch.

What makes Kölsch different from the familiar lager beer drunk in most other places in Germany? The question is one that puzzles even Michael Jackson, the award-winning author of "The World Guide to Beer" and the host of the BBC TV show "The Beer Hunter."

"Other than saying it's a top-fermented version of a pilsner, it's difficult to explain," Jackson told DW-WORLD. "Kölsch is teasingly delicate but also elusive."

Like a classic German beer daydreaming that it's a glass of champagne?

"Yeah," Jackson said. "I think that's a pretty good way of putting it."

A local treat

The microbrewery movement that's radically changed American and British drinking habits in the past two decades hasn't caught on in Germany, where most people prefer to stick with standard, albeit high-quality, lagers and wheat beers.

If tourists want to try beer styles not widely available outside Germany, they need to look in specific local regions. That's down to history. The development of Kölsch, for instance, was an innovative reaction to the growing industrialization of beer brewing in the mid-nineteenth century.

"It's like the brewers in Cologne said: 'We want to stay as we are, so we'd better define and protect a Cologne style of beer,'" Jackson said.

Kölsch, then, was the result of something like a microbrewery movement during the Industrial Revolution. And Päffgen, Früh and other Cologne breweries have stayed true to that original idea.

A registered name

Part of Kölsch's appeal may be that American microbrewers have never succeeded in copying it.

"American brewers are fantastic, but they've never gotten Kölsch quite right," Jackson said,

And even if they had, they wouldn't be allowed to use the name. By international agreement, the word "Kölsch" -- like the terms "cognac" or "champagne" -- is reserved for products made in and around Cologne.

That's one more reason to travel to Germany's fourth-largest city and one of its few centers of alternative beer brewing.