OK, we give up for now.  We’ll get the next post up on Monday, March 14. 

March 7, 2016. Post 0018.

Dülken is a town of almost 100,000 people, yet like so many other similar German cities it has a small-town feel.   It didn’t even come close to the cutoff for making the book – no breweries, and a beer range that you could easily find in the bigger Rhine cities.

But for a couple of days in July, it reminded us how easy it is to find a place that we’d never been before to enjoy a beer we’d never had before.

The Viersen-Dülkener Bierbörse brings a range of about 300 beers to the streets of the old town.  Tables are everywhere there is shade, and beer flows from carts, wagons, and the town’s invigorated pubs.  If the festival overlaps with the World Cup, as it did in 2010, you can’t find a seat that doesn’t have a view of a giant projection TV.

The magnificent Sankt Cornelius looms over the whole scene as if offering a blessing to the fest-goers below.  Food stalls offer plenty of cheap choices – you could do wurst.  No fest can occur without killing chickens.   It can get crowded on Saturday night, but arrive near the opening time of 2PM and you can sip a beer from anywhere you want as you watch the vendors scramble to finish getting set up before the hordes arrive.

We found two places for beer we haven’t tried.  One has to be the strangest brewery we’ve ever seen.  Box Bräu rolls into festivals all over the Rhine area and brews on the spot, filling the squares with the heavenly aroma of boiling mash.  They truck the wort back to a warehouse where fermenting tanks lager the beer for a future festival.

We’re pretty sure that most of the people drinking at the food-truck-looking brewery think they’re drinking fresh-brewed beer, but it’s a great show and everyone is happy, so when and where the beer was actually brewed (they wouldn’t tell us) perhaps doesn’t matter.

The dunkel was a fine beer to drink as the evening cooled.  A mild yeast remained to soften roast and chocolate notes and a hint of coffee finished it up.

The other source of new beers is better left alone unless you’re as compulsive about running up tasting numbers as we are.  The “Haus der 131 Biere” likewise runs the Rhine festival circuit with crates of bottles that don’t get any fresher as the summer goes on.  They specialize in beers that aren’t local – and often aren’t German.

A Hepworth Gurka British lager from Horsham was mostly skunk and sugar, and some spiced beers from the Belgian Strubbe brewery were even worse.  We’ve had some excellent beers from Strubbe – at one time, at least, they brewed one of the better Flemish Reds – but they seem to be willing to crank out some pretty sketchy offerings in the hope of corralling some floating Euros.

It didn’t take us long to give up on the stale stuff and just turn to the alts, kölsches, and lagers that the Rhine area does so well.  If the beers are common, they’re also fresh, and the buzz of the festival and the aura of the old town would have made Bitburger taste pretty good.

Oh, wait … it did.

Details:  Viersen-Dülkener Bierbörse;  July 1 – 3,  2016;  Alter Markt, 41751 Viersen-Dülken

Opening times:  Friday: 14:00 – 24:00;  Saturday: 14.00 – 24.00;  Sunday: 12:00 to 20:00

More information here.