Beer is made somewhere. Go and stand in it.
Which Prague cellar pours the unfiltered Pilsner. What a Munich beer hall night actually costs. Whether the Guinness Storehouse ticket is worth the queue. Reviews of every brewery tour, tasting and beer garden you can book.
Five afternoons that explain what beer is doing in that glass.
A cellar, a brewhouse, a bench under chestnut trees, a bathtub of hops. What each one costs and what the people who booked it say.
01The unfiltered onePilsner Urquell Experience & Beer TastingPilsner Urquell straight from the oak lager barrel in the Plzen cellars, poured under Prague. Nothing else tastes like the beer at its own source.
02The long Munich nightBavarian Beer and Food Evening Tour in MunichBavarian food between the beer halls, with a litre in front of you at every stop. Book the evening slot and walk back.
03The strange oneBernard Beer Spa with Beer and Massage OptionA tub of hops, malt and warm beer in Prague, with a tap by your elbow. Ninety minutes, and you smell like a brewery for a day.
04The craft crawlPorto Craft Beer Tour: 7 Beers + 3 Food Pairings in a Small GroupSeven beers and three food pairings around Porto in a small group. The clearest hour anyone will spend explaining hops to you.
05Under the cityHidden Brewery Caverns Tour in Cincinnati with Beer TastingCincinnati brews in the lagering caverns cut under the streets in the 1860s, then a tasting in the dark.
Germany: the beer hall, the brewery gate and the bench outside.
Every German beer tour →
Cologne pours Kolsch in 200ml glasses until you put the beer mat on top. Munich drinks by the litre under chestnut trees. Dusseldorf serves the dark Alt across the river and pretends Cologne does not exist. Three cities, three arguments, one country.
A Munich beer hall night
Hofbrauhaus, Augustiner and the smaller halls the locals actually drink in, with pork and pretzel between them. The guide orders; you keep up or you do not.
Inside a working German brewery
Becks in Bremen, the Kolsch houses in Cologne, the BRLO tanks in Berlin. Mash tun, lauter tun, the smell of hot grain, then three glasses at the end of it.
Bench, shade, bring your own bread
A Bavarian beer garden lets you carry in your own food as long as you buy the beer. Most of these arrive by bike, which settles the question of the second litre.
Six countries that built a culture around what they brew.
Bohemian lager cellars, Bavarian halls, Trappist abbeys, Irish stout, American taprooms and Australian brewery yards. Six places to start, and the best day out in each.
The brewhouse tour is the one that changes how you drink.
Grain into mash, mash into wort, wort into a tank the size of a bus. Forty minutes of stainless steel and hot bread smell, and then the part where they open the taps. These are the ones travellers book most.
Prague drinks more beer per head than anywhere on earth. Plan around that.
Pilsner was invented ninety kilometres west of the city and the Czechs never let it go. The tank beer is unpasteurised, the cellars are cold and the tasting rooms are cheaper than a coffee in Vienna.
Every Prague beer tour →
The beer tours more travellers take than any others.
Every beer tour we have reviewed →Storehouse tickets, brewery experiences and cellar tastings with tens of thousands of travellers behind them, and what earns each one the slot.
1
Unlimited Prosecco, Beer and Aperol Spritz Cruise
Spend 75 minutes on the Danube with unlimited Prosecco, beer, Aperol, spritzer, or lemonade, plus music and an English audio guide. Choose a warm indoor seat or open-air terrace, watch Parliament and Budapest’s bridges pass by, and arrive early for the best views.
From · $29
Read our review →
2
Heineken Experience Ticket including 2 Drinks
from $29
3
Guinness Storehouse Entry Ticket
from $34
4
City Canal Cruise and Heineken Experience Ticket
from $47
5
Guinness Storehouse Experience
from $36
6
White Orchid Chao Phraya Dinner Cruise free Beer
from $35
7
Laid back, Yarra Valley Wine Tour: Wine, Cider, Gin, Beer + Choc
from $93
8
Bernard Beer Spa with Beer and Massage Option
Beer gets stranger the further you take it from the bar.
A pedal-powered bar on wheels through Lisbon. A hot tub of hops and malt in Prague with a tap beside it. A canal boat with the beer included. Belgian chocolate matched to a dark abbey ale. The brewery tour is the beginning, not the whole of it.
What a brewery day actually costs.
Every tour on the site, grouped by price. A cellar tasting in Bohemia costs less than two pints in London, and it comes with the cellar.
Cellar tastings, self-guided brewery tours, storehouse tickets and the beer-bike hour.
Guided brewery crawls, beer-and-food evenings, the beer spa and the small-group craft tours.
Private brewery days, distillery-and-brewery combinations and the long regional runs with lunch.
Belgium brews like nowhere else and pours every beer in its own glass.
Trappist ales from six working monasteries, lambics fermented on wild yeast in open trays, a national habit of matching each brew to a shape of glassware. Brussels and Bruges do the tasting rooms; the abbeys are a short drive out.
- 1Guided Tour & Boat Ride with Optional Beer Tastingfrom $36
- 2Hungry Mary’s Famous Beer and Chocolate Tour in Brusselsfrom $119
- 3Belgian Beer Tasting in Brusselsfrom $36
Three things that only happen where beer is the point.
Wine has cellars and whisky has warehouses. Neither of them will put you in a bath of hops, sit you on a moving bar, or hand you a litre glass and a bench in a park.
The Beer Spa
A wooden tub of warm water, hops, crushed malt and brewers yeast, with a tap of unfiltered lager at your elbow and no limit on it. The Czechs sell it as a skin and circulation treatment; you will mostly notice that you smell of bread for a day. Sessions run about an hour, usually booked in pairs, and the straw bed afterwards is not optional.
- 1Bernard Beer Spa with Beer and Massage Option★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 4,164 reviews
- 2Beer Spa Bernard with Beer and Massage Option★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 447 reviews
- 3Caroline Bernard Beer Spa Prague with Beer & Massage Option★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 283 reviews
The Beer Bike
Ten or twelve stools bolted around a bar on wheels, everyone pedalling, a keg in the middle and a sober driver steering. Lisbon, Belfast and Amsterdam run them through the city centre at walking pace. Most cities cap them at an hour, several have banned them outright, and nobody has ever ridden one quietly.
- 1City Centre Beer Bike Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 · 292 reviews
- 21-Hour Beer Bike Tour with Draft Beer & Sangria Ride★★★★★★★★★★ 4.2 · 260 reviews
- 3Beer Bike Lisbon Experience★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 241 reviews
The Beer Garden
A Munich beer garden is legally required to keep a section where you can spread out your own bread, radish and cheese, as long as the beer comes from the counter. Chestnut trees were planted over the cellars to keep the lager cool before refrigeration; the shade is a by-product that outlived the reason.
- 1Classic Mike’s Bike Tour daily @ 11.30 incl Beer Garden & Surfers★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,246 reviews
- 2Beer and Food Tour with Dinner & Oktoberfest Museum★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 1,086 reviews
- 3Berlin City Bike Tour with Beer Garden Stop★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 917 reviews
Four beer bookings that will not wait until you land.
Most of a beer trip can be arranged over breakfast. These four run on timed entry, sixteen days of calendar or a tub that only takes two people at a time.
- 01Guinness Storehouse Entry TicketEntry is timed and the Dublin slots sell through in summer. The rooftop bar at the top has its own capacity, and it is the reason people go.
- 02Beer and Food Tour with Dinner & Oktoberfest MuseumSixteen days, one city, six tents. Table reservations open months out and the tours that hold them go with them.
- 03Pilsner Urquell Experience & Beer TastingThe unfiltered pour happens in the historic cellars, and only the guided slots go down there. Numbers per group are capped by the tunnel, not the brewery.
- 04Bernard Beer Spa with Beer and Massage OptionOne tub, two people, an hour each turn. Weekend evenings in Prague are gone well before the weekend.
Oktoberfest is sixteen days. Beer gardens close when it rains. Plan the rest of the year.
Munich fills its tents from late September to the first Sunday in October and the city prices double around it. Beer gardens run roughly April to October and shut on a wet afternoon. Everything below is indoors, year-round and priced the same in February: cellars, brewhouses, tasting rooms and a hot tub of hops. And book the ones that come with transport - most of these end with several full-strength beers and a drink-drive limit of 0.05 across most of Europe.
The USA has more breweries than Germany and Belgium combined. Start with a guide.
Denver, Asheville, San Diego, Nashville: taprooms cluster by the dozen and the good ones are spread across a city with no transport between them. A tour is the difference between four breweries and one.
By kind of day - brewhouse, bench, bike or bath
Prague, Plzen, Munich, Brussels: the run that teaches you the styles.
PlzenThe newest brewery and beer tour reviews.
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1-Day Tour Sapporo: The port city of Otaru & Local Brewery
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Polish Beer and Food Tasting Private Tour in Wroclaw
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Wellington Craft Brewery Half-Day Guided Tour with Tastings
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Street Art & Craft Beer Walking Tour with Tasting
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Craft Beer Tasting and Neighborhood Culture Crawl
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Street Art and Craft Beer 2 in 1 Walking Tour Vancouver
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