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A brief visit to the city of Kölsch

So there I was in Cologne and leaving Hauptbahnhof I crossed the Rhine, slow-moving, the colour of mud, upon which an elongated, snub-nosed barge was slowly making its way downstream. I stopped and took a photo, a snapshot of slothfulness perhaps and continued along the historic Hohenzollern Bridge. It was crammed with people through which bicycles and the occasional skateboarder cleaved their way, imperious and ‘get out of my way’ seemingly stamped on their features. Some people, were in groups whose colours defined their tribal affiliations — red and white for FC Köln, black and white for Eintracht Frankfurt. Sporting rivals presumably, a derby match of sorts, but there seemed no animosity as they thrust their way past me to the right side of the river, many of them swigging bottles of Kölsch. I, on the other hand, was caught up in the cross-current of people making their way towards the city centre, its location marked by the twin spires of the medieval cathedral. I first saw it when I was 18 and wrote in my diary, ‘looked at Cologne cathedral, brilliant, a Gothic masterpiece, so old. It was pouring with rain and quite cold generally today. Went shopping in Cologne’.

I don’t know what I bought but a later sentence in my diary mentioned that a bottle of wine was going back to the UK with me. I have a vague memory of it being red, partly because someone on our trip to Germany had told me that the local red wine was awful. I wanted to make my own mind up. I had recently turned 18 and was taking full advantage of the legal right to drink in pubs and bars, much to my mother’s concern. As I have written in the past, my mother was always proud of my journalistic work but she did concern herself that I drank too much, but she is now dead and I am not. Yet.

Once on dry land I moved slowly, surely and slightly claustrophobically with the crowd, pushing my way through a Christmas market in the shadow of the cathedral, the aromatic djinns of cooking meat, mulled wine and frying doughnuts darting about, twisting and twirling and enjoining the passers-by to gather at various stalls. I wasn’t tempted though as I had another goal in mind, to drink Kölsch. Once out of the dense crowd, like a cork slowly popped from a bottle, I made my way to Früh am Dom whose Kölsch I had always enjoyed. Here I wanted to place myself within a fulcrum of Cologne’s beer culture, even though I guessed the place would be rammed. I wanted to drink beer, to watch people and if possible get an insight to the behaviour of those who were streaming into this place of beer. Inside, tourists, locals, football fans flowed through a central corridor off which several rooms had tables and chairs where the hopeful could place themselves down and ask for portions of hefty, hearty food, the kind of meals that would sink the Bismarck and leave no survivors.

I was content to stand at a tall table in the corridor, though brief glances into the rooms showed that they were possessed of an interior soul that I called ‘Baronial hall chic’ in my notebook, Game of Thrones light perhaps, a bit like my 25cl glass of Kölsch, that was served to me by man in his mid-50s, stocky and bald, with the energy of a demon. He spoke English when he heard my poor German, ‘I will look after you’ he replied and I felt like I had been adopted.

Früh’s Kölsch is a very clean beer, golden in colour, and slight in aroma. It is very much a drinking beer, a beer to pour down your throat with abandonment, a beer whose character is sufficient to slake a thirst you didn’t know you had. There was a light bitterness in the finish and I detected a delicate fruitiness that reminded me of wild strawberries, but this timidity is very much the character of Kölsch. And when my glass was empty the same waiter brought me another one and scrawled two upright marks on a piece of paper and then put a cross through them as soon as I had paid him €5. I was slower on the second beer, my thirst slightly quenched, and as I stood there, a still centre in the storm of the crowd, a couple stood in front of me. Meanwhile, waiters shouted as they try to get through the crowd with plates of food, rushing through while people hung about and dithered. ‘Achtung!’ bellowed one waiter as he shouldered his way through the stream of people flowing through.

As seems to be common to the Kölsch bars I have visited in Cologne, the waiters were uniformly dressed, a uniform of work. Here the men (and they were all men as far as I could see) wore blue jumpers, white shirts, dark ties, dark starched aprons (around which were fastened money belts), black trousers, black shoes, a darkness of colours that seemed to represent the whole kinetic energy of their frantic progress. The waiters also seemed to have a brotherhood, a shared communality, as I watched new faces come on shift who were welcomed with handshakes and pats on the shoulder. It was time to leave to get my train to Brussels and a loud masculine roar of meat-generated shouts marked the place where the football fans were and I shouldered my way out into the cold clear air of a Saturday lunchtime in November.