Up and down the hill
The old town sits inside a ring of walls and towers, cut in two by the Pegnitz. Start at the Hauptmarkt, where the Schöner Brunnen stands under its iron grille and the Frauenkirche faces it across the square. Then climb: through the Tiergärtnertor, past Dürer's house, where he lived and worked from 1509, and up to the Kaiserburg on the sandstone ridge. The way up is steep in places, and the reward is the view back over the roofs rather than the castle itself.
The castle is the high point and the reason for the walk. From the courtyard the roofs run away in red tiles, and the Tiergärtnertor below looks like a gate in a model. On the way down, the Weißgerbergasse runs along the water with wooden galleries built out over the river, and the streets between it and the castle are steep and cobbled. The Weißgerbergasse is the best-preserved corner of the old town, and short enough to walk twice without noticing.
From the station the U1 runs one stop to Lorenzkirche, and the Hauptmarkt is five minutes further on foot across the river. The whole old town fits inside a circle of two kilometres, so you can drink in one quarter and sleep in another without a taxi. That is the main practical fact about Nuremberg. Trams and buses fill the gaps, but inside the walls you will not need them.
A beer city before Munich
In 1303 the council ruled that only barley could go into beer, two hundred years before the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, and in 1380 it ordered every brewer to dig his own cellar to a fixed depth and width. The cellars grew into a labyrinth of up to four storeys, covering 25,000 square metres, at a constant eight to twelve degrees. The council inspected the works, and a brewer whose pillars did not stand over one another was punished for it.
In the late Middle Ages the city had up to 42 breweries, and Nuremberg remained Bavaria's leading beer city well into the nineteenth century, ahead of Munich. The first German railway, from Nuremberg to Fürth in 1835, carried barrels of it as freight. Then the red beer went under: paler lagers and wheat beer were easier to brew and easier to sell, and the style disappeared. In the war the cellars were fitted out as air-raid shelters and held tens of thousands of people.
Altstadthof brought it back in 1984, in the house on Bergstraße that had been the Rotes Brauhaus. The cellars next door are open to visitors, and the tour ends with a glass in the brewery. That is the correct order: underground first, beer afterwards, and then the hill again if the evening is still young. The brewery keeps the same address, and the cellars beside it are the ones the council ordered in 1380.
Sausages, markets, and the shape of a day
Nuremberg's sausage is small, about twenty grams, and has been protected by EU law since 2003: only sausages made inside the city to the old recipe may carry the name. They come grilled, three at a time, in a roll — drei im Weggla — with mustard. The Bratwursthäusle at Rathausplatz 1 has been in the same trade since 1312, just behind the Hauptmarkt. The protected status covers the recipe and the size, not only the name, which is why the word means something specific here.
In December the Christkindlesmarkt takes over the Hauptmarkt, from the Friday before the first Advent until Christmas Eve. The Christkind, chosen every two years, opens it with a prologue from the gallery of the Frauenkirche. For the rest of the year the square is a vegetable market with tables in summer and the smell of roasted almonds only in memory. The stalls sell Lebkuchen and sausages, and the city has baked the first of those for centuries.
A day can be built around beer without much planning: Rotbier at the Altstadthof in the afternoon, the cellar tour at 17:30, then Schanzenbräu on the hill or the Tucher Mautkeller in the Mauthalle, a sandstone building from 1489, for the evening. Between them there is time for the castle and a plate of sausages. With one evening only, spend it at the Altstadthof and walk up to the castle afterwards in the dark.