Beer 101: Brewery Tours
Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure fermentation.
One of the best ways to learn more about beer is to visit where it is made. Most breweries large and small have some form of brewery tour or tasting. Some cost money, some are free, but all include a fresh taste of the beer made a stone’s throw away from where its poured.
This past weekend my wife and I visited Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We’ve been on quite a few tours but each brewery seems to teach us something new. In this case we were told a bit more about Bavarian beer purity laws, which dictate that a beer be made with only four ingredients: water, malt, hops, and yeast. Our wonderful guide on this particular occasion was a gruff but hilarious man named John. He was a prime example of what makes tours so fantastic, meeting people working in and around beer every day, people with a passion for and expert knowledge of beer.
As far a swag, many of the larger craft breweries will send you home with a tasting glass or even a full pint glass with coupons good for free pints at local bars. Most also feature gift shops where you can take home t-shirts, six-packs, and other branded memorabilia. Even if you learn nothing new and leave with nothing more than a belly full of beer, I would count such an experience a success.
Brewery tours afford the unique opportunity to try multiple styles from one brewery in it’s freshest form. You get to learn the character and style of the brewery. Some have their own unique strain of yeast which imparts a similar character to every beer brewed with it, even when the final products are stylistically opposite. Even if you don’t like the beer that a brewery is known for (if you’re sick of, say, Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale or Sam Adams’ Boston Lager, or Goose Island’s 312), there will be other beers to taste and you may be surprised! Don’t judge a brewery by their most widely distributed beer.
Beyond getting a crash course in what your local brewery has to offer, you’ll never taste fresher beer than when you taste it at a brewery, since it hasn’t traveled after being bottled or kegged. You can’t get more local than that.
It is so infinitely easy to find breweries near you. A quick maps search is all it takes to find out everything brewed in a particular city’s bounds. When visiting another city a quick tour of the local brewery makes for a enjoyable, affordable afternoon. After all, the best way to sample the local flavor is to do so from the people producing it.
Protip: Bring a designated driver, or plan to allow yourself a bit of time after the tasting before you drive home. Most breweries serve around 21–24oz of beer, which isn’t typically enough to get you over the legal limit, but just remember that you aren’t going on a tour of any old factory. There’s alcohol involved, obviously. If we’re driving to the brewery, we try to find a restaurant within walking distance so we can either start the tour with full stomachs or so we can enjoy a meal after the tour. Some tours (such as the Sam Adams tour) have a trolley driving back and forth between the brewery and a local restaurant.
