German-style Kölsch Beer and a Loaded BLT at Alvarado Street Brewery Taproom in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget
Chilly, rainy weather in February 2026 set the scene fro my family’s outing to the Alvarado Street Brewery Taproom in Salinas, California where I was able to relive happy memories from the time I lived in Stuttgart, Germany with my husband Laurent.
The Alvarado Street Brewery Taprooms offers American, English, and German beers on its extensive beer menu. Laurent and our daughter Florence Paget ordered German pilsners while I opted for the non-alcoholic kölsch beer. Our dinner outing was quickly becoming a brewpub evening.
Pilsner lagers originally come from Pilsen, Czech Republic, but the Germans have adopted the style as well. Lagers are cold fermented beers.
Kölsch beer from Cologne, Germany is a hybrid beer. It starts out as a warm fermented yeast, but is aged like a cold-fermented lager. The end result is a beer with fruity flavor, which I like very much. Alvarado Street Brewery serves this beer in the tall, thin glass called a stange like the ones in Cologne as well.
Kölsch beer has been brewed since 874 AD in Cologne, a northern German city on the Rhine River, according to the Oxford Companion to Beer edited by Garrett Oliver. It is only brewed in the Cologne area and has a legally protected status, which I refer to the kölsch beer at Alvarado Street Brewery Taproom as German style kölsch.
It is easy to have a German brew pub experience at Alvarado Street Brewery thanks to its updated classic bar menu that reflects how brewing and baking are intertwined industries with a history that includes Germany but stretches back to ancient Sumeria and Egypt.
You can even see beer and bread making and wine cultivation on the Mastaba Tomb of Perneb (ca. 2881 – 2323 Bc) a 4,500 year old structure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Brewing and baking use both yeast and grain (usually barley and sometimes wheat in Germany).
Women originally took care of both duties. Later, men took over these roles in breweries and monasteries. Bread products can be made from the spent grain used to brew beer.
All of the main menu items at Alvarado Street Brewery Taproom can use spent grain in some form with the following items:
-pretzels served with warm beer cheese
-hamburgers – the buns on the burger can be made with spent grain for this sandwich that originally hails from Hamburg, Germany
-BLT sandwich (Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato Sandwich) and spicy chicken sandwich – the bread for these sandwiches can be made with spent grain
-arugula salad – the lettuce is obviously produce, but you can make croutons with bread made with spent grain
-pizza – Alvarado Street Brewery Taprooms serves Italian pizzas, but there is a Franco-German pizza from Strasbourg, France called flammekueche (flammeküchen) made with chopped slab bacon, thinly sliced onions, and a sour cream-like sauce that can be made with dough using spent grain as well. You can buy flammekueche pizza frozen in Germany and France.
Spent grain tastes similar to regular grain but develops a darker color when baked and adds a huge cost savings for brew pubs. These savings allow brew pubs to spend money on fine, white cake flour for tarts like the Bartlett Pear Tart at Alvarado Street Brewery Taproom.
With this historical background in mind, my family thoroughly enjoyed our orders of a smashburger for Laurent, a BLT sandwich for me, and a spicy chicken sandwich for Florence seasoned with Hungarian paprika and cayenne. My BLT had added mozzarella cheese for a calcium and protein boost.
Pub food made with fresh, organic ingredients is hard to beat. It also arrives quickly, and hot at Alvarado Street Brewery Taproom in Salinas, California, which makes a visit there relaxing and pleasant.
The Alvarado Street Brewery is located at the intersection of Alvarado and Main Streets in Salinas with parking behind the taproom, down Main Street by the Steinbeck Center, and some street parking in legally marked spots.
Note: For readers interested in Cologne, Germany, I haves listed a link below to my blog about visiting this city and its cathedral, which is a major German pilgrimage site:
Cologne, Germany - Holy City on the Rhine
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France and developer of the Novgorod and Bento War Games
