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Few European cities wear their Roman past as visibly as Cologne. Founded as Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium in 50 AD, the city on the Rhine has been continuously inhabited for two millennia, and that layered history is legible at street level: a surviving section of the Roman city wall here, a Romanesque basilica there, and above everything the twin spires of the Cathedral rising 157 metres above the old town. The Dom, as locals call it, took over six hundred years to complete and remains one of the largest Gothic churches in the world. It is the gravitational centre around which visitors instinctively orient themselves on arrival.

The old town, or Altstadt, fans out from the Cathedral towards the Rhine, its lanes lined with brewhouses serving Kölsch, the pale, top-fermented beer that is as much a civic institution as a drink. Kölsch is served only in straight, narrow glasses called Stangen, and only in Cologne; the city's brewers have a protected designation of origin that makes the beer as geographically specific as Champagne. A tour that combines the Cathedral and the old town with a Kölsch tasting threads together architecture, history, and local custom in a way that makes immediate sense of the city's character.