If I remember my German correctly this should be pronounced something like “kerlsh”, correct?
What about the water profile for this one? Should it be kept to a low mineral content?
Yeah, that’s close. Sort of shape your mouth to make the ‘e’ sound but then shape your lips to make the ‘o’ sound. It adds a kind of ooo to the e that puts it in the ballpark. At least that’s how it sounds to me.
I usually make it with relatively low mineral content, but I like most of my beers that way. I use 50/50 CaCl2 and CaSO4 and keep the total amount fairly low.
Gordon’s description is pretty close to how they say it in Köln as I recall. On the other hand in an English conversation with a native German speaker in Bamberg about the rest of our trip, he said it a lot closer to how Americans typically say it.
Kinda like “how do you pronounce Louisville?” Do you want to know how they pronounce it there or how they pronounce it in, say, Chicago which is thought to be a neutral US accent.
Yep, that “lips trick” is how we learned it in German class too. Good old Frau Eck.
I think of the “oe” in German as how we say it in shoe. But that is me and my poor Deutsch.
My German friends say the broadcasters there all have the Hanover accent.
I’m definitely going to add one of these to my brewing schedule soon. Sounds like a great beer to have on tap for the hot summer months.
In Köln it also sounded to my ears a little bit like it starts with a really hard G, like a regular American hard G ending with a harder K sound.
FWIW mine:
German 2 row pilsner 7.5
German Wheat 1
German Munich .75
Tettnanger @60 1.5
Spalt @15 .5
Spalt @ 5 .25
Czech Saaz @5 .25
Wyeast 2565
65º two weeks, another week at 34º, Keg and drink, although it will continue to clear for another two weeks in the kegerator to where you can read a newspaper through it.
No medals… just raving reactions from the wife, and from my colleagues that have spent enough time drinking various iterations of it in Köln.
When you order beer you don’t use the plural. You order “two beer” not “two beers” so in this case “zwei Kölsch”… If you were to describe many Kölsches as in “there are many different Kölsches brewed in Köln” I think it would be Kölschen… but German is my third language and I am only abou 65% proficient. I defer to Kai on this one.
Kolsch will most likely become one of my house beers. The simplicity coupled with great flavor won me over immediately. Now that we’re going into summer a big batch is in order.
+1
I need to brew one up for the summer. Great on a hot day.
+1, or a cream ale. Which I make depends on the ambient fermentation temp. Warmer, I make the cream ale. Cooler, I make the Kolsch. (Yes, I’ve always known it needs an umlaut; how do you insert one in this interface? HTML codes and alt codes don’t seem to work)
I find it easiest to just copy and paste it from somewhere. 
Alt U works for me… But it’s a Staples USB keyboard on a MAC… :-\
“When in doubt, use brute force.” – Ken Thompson
Last summer/fall, I had the opportunity to taste all of the “classic” examples of pub Kolsch in Koln and I think the biggest difference between most homebrew versions and those versions is the clarity…
I only wish more judges would make this trip because the style does have a lot more range (not in appearance/color so much as flavor/esters) than most judges (or their scoresheets) would have you believe…
Yes, Koelsch can be very different between the breweries. Altbier can also be very different from place to place in Duesseldorf.
Herr Strong may have something to add.
I use “option-u”, then “o”, but I’ve never been able to find a way to do it in Windows within a browser without cutting and pasting from Word. However, “Koelsch” is perfectly acceptable by German spelling conventions and not uncommon.
Yep. We hit all of the classic pub Alts in Dusseldorf too… I’d highly recommend anyone visiting one of the two cities consider just visiting both since they are just a short train ride from each other.
Windows extended character set entry is a lot less intuitive. What you have to do is make sure your numlock is on, hold down alt, and hit 148 on the numpad. Then release the alt, that should stick in a ö at the insertion point. 153 gets you Ö. There are tables on the interwebs for alt kepad entry codes for ascii characters.
Using a windows laptop without a separate numbers pad. Tried using function keys to get the alternate keypad, but that didn’t work.
I have it set up in Word to do an autocorrect whenever I type Koln, Kolsch, Dusseldorf, etc. So I’m used to typing them that way. Adding an e after everything is something I’ll almost always forget to do. On a Mac at home right now, so the option-u/o works: see ö. So Köln, Kölsch, Düsseldorf… Windows sucks but I don’t get a choice to use what I want where I work.