is one of the four brewpubs in and around the old town of Düsseldorf, Germany, that has defined our modern understanding of the altbier style. The others are Brauerei Ferdinand Schumacher, Im Füchschen, and Zum Schlüssel. See altbier. The site of the Uerige was first mentioned in a 1632 land tax registry of Düsseldorf. It was then shared by a baker named Martin Pütz and an innkeeper named Dietrich Pfeilsticker. It became a brewery in 1862, when Hubert Wilhelm Cürten, a baker and brewmaster, bought the premises. He converted and expanded the building—seemingly without a plan. The result was a completely confusing jumble of Spartan halls, narrow passageways, dark and smoky recesses, and cozy, intimate niches, each with its own decor—as is still the case today. The place got its name from the nickname Cürten’s patrons bestowed upon him. He was apparently a man of dour disposition, so they called him the “uerige,” which means “grouch” in the local vernacular.
The establishment suffered serious damage during the bombing raids of World War II, but it was restored to its original condition. Today, the Uerige is one of the few breweries left in Germany where draught beer is still served in old-fashioned wooden casks and poured by gravity. See gravity dispense. In the summer, the Uerige puts out high tables in front of the building, turning the street into a veritable beer garden. Next to its traditional altbier, Uerige also produces a weissbier, a top- fermented wheat beer style that has experienced a dramatic revival in Germany in recent decades. See weissbier. Perhaps the most interesting beer at the Uerige is sticke, a bock-like version of the altbier that is brewed to a strength of 6% alcohol by volume, with more malt and more hops than the regular Uerige brew. Sticke is made only twice a year, ready for tapping on the third Tuesday in January and the third Tuesday in October, respectively. According to local lore, the first sticke was simply a brewmaster’s mistake, fairly common at a time when beer ingredients were still measured rather haphazardly by the “bucketfull.” But the people liked the resulting beer, so the “mistake” was turned into a habit, and the recipe varied from one batch to the next, depending on the brewmaster’s whim and inclination. Because the patrons never knew what was going to be in the next sticke, it acquired its peculiar name: “sticke” is a mangled version of the low-German word “stickum,” which means “secret.” In a certain way, sticke became something similar to the changing “reserve” beers that craft brewers enjoy producing.
In the winter of 2007–2008, Uerige added a distillery and a separate pub in an adjacent building, where it produces two whiskey-like varieties of beer schnapps made from sticke wort that is brewed without hops. They have an alcohol by volume level of 42% and are appropriately named Stickum and Stickum plus.
