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+1 on Gent, lovely place and some really nice bars.

"oconn":2znk91ct wrote: dusseldorf / cologne for along weekend alt/kolsh all the way..[/quote:2znk91ct]

I've to be honest... I found the latter got very boring very fast! Maybe November just isn't the time for it though... Still a lovely city, you just really have to like Kölsch an awful lot if you want to go there for the beer.

I agree. I find Kölsch really boring if I have to drink it all day. But there are alternatives in Cologne. Braustelle do some interesting-sounding beers, only one of which I have tried: Rosemarie, a rosemary-infused amber lager, and very nice it was too. And Freischem’s Brauhaus[/url:3lh8ppab] (no need for the apostrophe in German, my wife says) does a passable stout (the brewer's parents are from Liverpool). That reminds me, I have a voucher for a free beer there!

Rosemary lager? Now there's a thought...

Personally, I've found foreign knock-offs of Kölsch to be more interesting than the real stuff, unless I missed all the good ones (I think I tried 8 of the 16, somewhere along those lines...). Maybe some subtlety is beyond me, but I'm not hugely convinced.

My colleagues had a similarly dim view of Kölsch when I did a blind tasting[/url:3tmj1rbk] a while ago <!-- s:D --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_biggrin.gif" alt="" title="Very Happy" /><!-- s:D -->

Awful cliché, but it's got to be cask. The keg ones really taste like any lager. Most are made in the same macrobrewery, I believe.