Anyone can drink the beer. Go and see where it is made.
Which Pilsner Urquell tour goes down to the oak. What a Kölsch brewhouse charges for three glasses and a guide. Whether the Bruges cellar beats the Brussels tasting room. Reviews of the brewery tours you can actually book.
A Bohemian cellar, a Kölsch brewhouse, a Brussels bench, a Cincinnati tunnel.
Four brewery days that carry a whole trip. What each pour costs, and what the people who took the tour say afterwards.
01The Bohemian onePilsner Urquell Experience & Beer TastingThe lagering tunnels under Prague, finishing with beer drawn unfiltered from an oak barrel.
02The Rhineland oneBrewery Tour with 3 Kölsch Beer TastingsThree Kölsch glasses and the brewhouse that fills them, in the only city allowed to brew it.
03The Belgian oneBelgian Beer Tasting in BrusselsA bench, a flight and a guide who explains why every Belgian beer arrives in its own glass.
04The American oneHidden Brewery Caverns Tour in Cincinnati with Beer TastingLagering caverns dug into an Ohio hillside before refrigeration existed, reopened and poured in.
Six countries that built the beer you drink at home.
Bohemia gave the world pilsner, Bavaria gave it the beer garden, Belgium gave it the glassware and the monks. America dug tunnels before it had refrigeration. Start in one of these and the tour books itself.
Sometimes you want the beer, not the boiler room.
A tasting sits you down with a flight and somebody who can tell you what you are holding: six Belgian styles in a Brussels cellar, four Czech lagers off the tank, a Kölsch flight poured by a Köbes who will keep going until you put the mat on the glass.
The taproom crawl has quietly replaced the brewery tour.
Small breweries do not have a visitor centre or a coach park. What they have is a bar in the corner of the production floor, and a guide who knows which four to walk between.
Caverns, taproom crawls or your own guide. Three ways to do a US brewery day.
America has more breweries than anywhere and no single way to visit them. Three shapes of day, what it costs to get on each one, and the kind of city it suits.
The brewery days more travellers book than any other.
Open the whole brewery catalogue →Cellars, brewhouses and tasting rooms that stay full all season, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
Guided Tour & Boat Ride with Optional Beer Tasting
Walk Bruges with guides such as JK, Maria, or Peter, visiting the Beguinage, Markt, Burg Square, and canal viewpoints. Then take a 30-minute boat ride and, if selected, taste four Belgian beers. The walking tour lasts about two hours, while the full experience runs 150 minutes to three hours.
From · $36
Read our review →
2
Pilsner Urquell Experience & Beer Tasting
from $25
3
Brewery Tour with 3 Kölsch Beer Tastings
from $32
4
Pilsner Urquell Brewery Tour with Beer Tasting
from $21
5
Staropramem Brewery Self-Guided Tour with Tasting
from $14
6
Hidden Brewery Caverns Tour in Cincinnati with Beer Tasting
from $49
7
Porto Craft Beer Tour: 7 Beers + 3 Food Pairings in a Small Group
from $90
8
Brewery Tour with Alt Beer Tastings
from $32
Pilsner was invented in one Czech town and it never really left.
Everything in the Czech Republic →
Plzen brewed the first pale lager in 1842 and the copper and the caves are still there. Prague drinks the result at a rate no other country matches. These three carry more travellers than anything else in the country.
Down to the oak, or just the brewhouse
The tour walks the modern brewhouse either way. The part worth choosing for is the trip below ground, where the beer still lagers in oak and gets drawn straight from the barrel.
Prague, on foot, four stops in
Prague’s own beer is a taproom crawl rather than a factory visit: small breweries, one glass each, a guide who orders in Czech and a walk between them that keeps you upright.
A self-guided ticket and a glass
No group, no schedule. You walk the exhibition at your own speed and the ticket ends at the bar with the beer it was always about. The best hour a wet Prague afternoon gets.
Prague drinks more beer per head than anywhere on earth. Act accordingly.
The Pilsner Urquell experience by the river, the tank-beer taprooms the locals actually use, and a food walk that treats the beer as the main course rather than the thing you wash it down with.
Every Prague brewery day →
Germany brews to a 500-year-old rule and argues about it by city.
Cologne pours Kölsch in a 200ml glass and replaces it until you stop it. Düsseldorf, an hour away, pours dark Alt and enjoys the rivalry. Munich takes it outdoors and lets you bring your own bread. Three cities, three arguments, all of them tourable.
- 1Brewery Tour with 3 Kölsch Beer Tastingsfrom $32
- 2Brewery Tour with Alt Beer Tastingsfrom $32
- 3Altbier-Safari Beer Walking Tourfrom $43
What a brewery day actually costs, once the beer is included.
Every tour on the site, sorted by the price on the door. A surprising number of the best ones cost less than the round you would have bought anyway.
Brewhouse tours with two or three glasses at the end, museum tickets that finish at the bar, self-guided visits.
Guided crawls of four taprooms, food-and-beer walks, the full cellar tours and the bus that drives you between breweries.
Private guides, all-day trips out to brewing country, and the tastings that put rare bottles in front of you.
Three things you cannot drink anywhere else.
Lager is brewed on every continent now. Unfiltered pilsner from a Bohemian oak barrel, a Kölsch that may legally only come from one city, and a Bavarian garden where you bring your own lunch are not.
Unfiltered, from the oak
In 1842 a Bavarian brewer in Plzen combined pale malt, soft local water and cold cellar lagering and produced the first golden beer anybody had seen. The sandstone tunnels under the brewery are still cut into the rock, still cold, and a few barrels are still filled the old way purely so the tour can end down there with a glass of unfiltered beer that never leaves the building.
- 1Pilsner Urquell Experience & Beer Tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 3,480 reviews
- 2Pilsner Urquell Brewery Tour with Beer Tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 2,419 reviews
- 3Prague Pilsner Urquell Experience with 3 Free Beer Tastings★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 736 reviews
A glass for every beer
Belgian brewing kept everything the rest of Europe standardised away: spontaneous fermentation in open vats, brewing inside abbey walls, strengths that read like wine, and the settled conviction that each beer needs its own shaped glass to be served properly. A tasting here is less a flight than an argument about glassware that happens to come with six beers.
- 1Belgian Beer Tasting in Brussels★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,280 reviews
- 2Belgian Waffle-Making Workshop with Beer Tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 960 reviews
- 3Brussels 2.5-Hour Belgian Beer Tasting Experience★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 932 reviews
The garden you bring lunch to
Bavarian beer gardens carry a right won in the nineteenth century: under the chestnut trees the brewery sells the beer and you are free to bring your own food. Locals turn up with radishes, bread and a tablecloth. The litre Maß is the standard measure, the self-service tables are the ones where this applies, and the served tables are where it does not.
- 1Berlin City Bike Tour with Beer Garden Stop★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 917 reviews
- 2Guided City Tour by Bike with Beer Garden Stop★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 604 reviews
- 3Berlin City Bike Tour with Beer Garden Stop★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 308 reviews
What actually stops people getting into a brewery.
Four things catch travellers out. There is a legal drinking age at the door and it wants photo ID. Working breweries do not brew every day, so some tours see a quiet plant. Plenty of European tours run in the local language with only a couple of English slots. And nobody should be driving afterwards, which is the whole argument for a walk, a bike or a bus with somebody else at the wheel.
By city — where you are drinking
Plzen, Prague, Munich, Cologne, Brussels, Bruges: one rail pass, six brewing traditions.
PlzenFresh reviews off the taps.
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