Two of the beer bloggers I read regularly, Ron Pattinson and Martin Taylor, have both been to the Rhineland recently and I've been enjoying their reports from some of my favourite Düsseldorf and Cologne pubs.
That led me to this piece which fellow beer bloggers Boak and Bailey wrote about Altbier, the beer served in Düsseldorf brewpubs, back in 2008, the year before I first went there, in which they concluded: "To recreate the Alt effect at home: Get a nice brown bitter that you like, chill it for a couple of hours, and pour it carelessly into a 250ml tumbler so that it eventually settles down to half beer, half head. We tried it — it works. A good alt is very like a cold, super bitter English ale. In our humble opinion, this better recreates the alt experience than buying a tired bottle of boring Diebels from your local specialist beer emporium."
I bought a few bottles of Sam Smith's Nut Brown Ale the other day so tried it with one of them, and it definitely worked: I almost felt like I was drinking a glass of beer in a Düsseldorf brewpub, albeit one at the maltier end of the Altbier spectrum (think Schumacher or Schlüssel rather than Uerige or Füchschen).
Altbier is usually, and rightly, compared to a British style pale ale, being hoppy, copper coloured and top fermented, but in Düsseldorf they often describe it to English speaking visitors as a dark beer (which is it compared to Pils, the standard beer in northern Germany). The maltier and darker examples also line up in taste and colour with a brown ale.
