Kölsch

One of the nice things about having a garage sale, or any other sort of clutter-purging, is unexpectedly discovering stuff that isn't clutter at all. Preparing for our garage sale of this weekend, I opened up a box in the basement that hadn't been touched in years. I assumed everything in there was junk to be sold, but was surprised to find a smaller box inside that contained the five glasses in the photo above. They're beer glasses, or more specifically Kölsch glasses, after the beer style native to the Cologne area of northern Germany. The glasses were a family hand-me-down from my cousin Bud in Green Bay, Wisconsin, who passed away during the late 1990s. We last had these glasses out on display in our condo in Chicago, more than ten years ago, but they were packed up when we moved and never re-emerged until just now. I knew they probably hadn't ever been thrown away, but still I always wondered where they were. Once found again, I cleaned them up and now have them on display in a cabinet.

The fact that they're Kölsch glasses has even greater meaning for me, given that Kölsch was the first real beer I ever drank (sorry, Heilemann's Old Style, you really don't qualify) during a visit to Germany when I was sixteen years old. In fact, the two glasses on the right - Küppers and Dom - are the two brands I remember consuming the most while I was there. So I'm doubly pleased to have these glasses again.

Of course, there's only one way to make these great-looking glasses look even better:



My local liquor store is pretty limited on German beers in general (the dudes in line in front of me were buying cases of Bud Light and shooters of Cuervo), and of course had no genuine Kölsch. So I went with Dortmunder Gold from Great Lakes Brewing (from Cleveland, Ohio), with Dortmund being as close as I could get to Cologne. Last night, after getting the garage sale remnants disposed of and myself cleaned up, I cracked one open, poured it in the Küppers glass, and had a wonderfully refreshing and relaxing time.