The Leeds-Dortmund Connection

As a young scamp, meeting your mates in ‘town’ in the eighties and early nineties meant only one place – ‘The Fat Man with The Barrel’. We didn’t care who he was, with his mercurial grin and smiling eyes poking out from under his cap, and we cared even less. He was just ‘the’ place to meet and tower over us as we plotted how to get our underage selves into The Odeon cinema to watch Tim Burton’s Batman.

Given that I see the rotund fella most days as I travel to work, I started thinking only recently about his connection with Leeds – and how that connection is Beer.

Leeds was twinned with Dortmund in in 1969, and to celebrate ten years of partnership, we were presented with the bronze Dortmund Drayman, which was sculpted by a chap named Arthur Shulze-Engles.
In my mind, the beer connection hits home straight away. Whereas Leeds has beer, with Tetley’s in particular propping up its history, Dortmund has its Pale ale. Dortmunder Union were, as the name suggests, a cabal of smaller, local brewhouses who joined forces to brew a new, pale, pilsner-style thirst quencher for the factory workers, and became the largest exponents of the style in the process. The beer became known simply as “Dortmunder Union” and the rest is beery history. This refreshing, crisp pale ale was so popular that Dortmunder Union became Germany's largest brewery for a while. Although dwarfed by Pils sales these days in the homeland, the style has its fans and remains somewhat cultish over here.

I’ve sipped Dortmunder Union many a time at North Bar – in fact, it was a bit of a staple when I was younger and didn’t know enough to make an informed decision when faced with North’s kaleidoscopic beer list (They have DAB on tap nowadays). To me and my buddies, ‘Union’ was a clean, crisp lager sophisticate, and it certainly helped those long hot summers (that we don’t get anymore, it would seem) go by a lot faster. Purists would argue that DU is a style in itself, something that I personally don’t agree with, but I’m glad we are twinned with a city with something of interest to me- and I hope that others agree with my notion that ‘The Fat Man with the Barrel’ should stand proudly (but thirstily) side by side with our glowering Black Prince in terms of sights to see in Leeds.