6 Beverage Tour Ideas To Enrich Your Tour Offer
If you are looking for ways to enrich your tours and activities with a niche tour, have you considered starting a wine tour business or organizing beer tours?
It’s almost certainly one of the best ways to offer tourists the chance to mingle with the locals and try out the local beverages.
Beverage tours are becoming increasingly popular though they are still a niche type of tour. The good news is there are a lot of types of beverage tours.
Here’s What Type of Beverage Tours You Can Organize and Make Your Tours Exceptional
There are so many craft breweries, artisan distilleries, cideries, wine tasting rooms, as well as spirit tours that you should have no trouble coming up with an idea for a great beverage tour yourself!
While wine and beer tours are considered to be the most popular beverage tours, tea and coffee tours are gaining in popularity.
Beer Tours
Visiting a brewery can be just as fun, if not more fun than visiting a fair! For customers that are not a big fan of historic sights and visits to the museum, you can organize a beer tour. Or even better — a private tour that offers a private driver as well.
There’s a whole variety of beer tastes for beer lovers to try out.
Beer tours usually include a tour around the brewery and customers get to try out different kinds of beer. This is where they get to hear more about how beer is made, the difference between pilsners, lagers, ales, crafts, etc.
Some breweries go into full detail like what type of yeast is used and the temperature of fermentation, or what’s the proper way to pour a beer. The company also shares the story behind the brewery, such as their brewing history.
Most tours include and offer some form of food tasting as well. Because, hey, one cannot drink on an empty stomach.
You’d be surprised, but tourists who book beer tours aren’t just your average beer lovers, most of them are genuine beer nerds interested in much more than just its taste.
For example, real beer enthusiasts are interested in the packaging, label design, and most about anything that’s peculiar for that brewery. So do your research and try to pick a good one.
The more obscure one, the better.
If you don’t have a quality brewery near your business, why not make a list of all obscure pubs that offer great beer instead?
If that’s not your cup of tea, organize a trip to a beer festival. Oktoberfest first comes to mind.
Now, if you want a top-notch tour, you can create a special tour that offers non-alcoholic beers and gluten-free beer.
(Don’t even think about saying that a non-alcoholic beer is not a real beer. People are really conscious what they eat and drink today. You need to adjust to their needs.)
And though beer tasting might not sound as fancy nor as sophisticated as wine tasting, you can organize a beer tasting crash course to make things more interesting. For example, how to judge a beer. And yes, just like those elegant wine tastings, it does involve smelling.
Anyhow, I’m pretty sure your group would be more than thrilled to come back home and brag about what beer experts they’ve become on the tour that you led.
Wine Tours
Let me ask you, who doesn’t like wine?
Oh wait. People who love beer?
But you’ll cover that issue in the organize-a-beer-tour section. (Psst, there are beer-wine hybrids as well.)
Wine tasting has always been regarded as expensive, luxurious, and reserved for the pompous people. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
You don’t have to organize a luxurious visit to vineyards with caviar nibbling and bling-bling stuff. Of course, that’s an option if you wish to attract a certain clientele with a refined taste and a deep pocket.
For most people, wine tasting is a nice time to relax, try some new wine, learn a thing or two about noble grapes.
Equally important is the food that’s usually served while wine tasting. Certain kinds of wine go best with specific food groups. For example, the winery often offers their home-made and local-grown delicacies, like various types of cheese, home-made jam, and marmalade, olives, honey.
Start by researching individual wineries and what kind of special wines they produce.
For instance, are they white or red wineries or they offer a bit of both. You can pick one vineyard or include a few in your tour route.
Also, check which wineries charge for wine tasting — most wine tastings are free, but just in case, give them a call.
The great thing about doing wine tours is that you can nurture business relationships as well as support sustainable tourism by promoting local wineries.
Make an arrangement with the local wineries to bring foodies and wine lovers to their rural setting winery. You can always work out a mutually beneficial business deal. At the same time, can enrich your business relationships and grow a booming business.
As well as for beer tours, it’s always a good idea to organize transportation to the winery and back, and not just the wine tasting itself.
If you want to organize something really exotic, pick a bizarre wines theme for your tour. There are so many oddly tasteful wines out there such as the Ethiopian honey wine, rose petal wine from the Lurgashall Winery, Vietnamese snake bile wine, coffee-flavored wine (yes, that exists), or Jalapeno wine.
Spirits Drinking Tours
When you Google “spirit tours” the first thing that pops up is voodoo, cemetery, and creepy ghost tours. Since ghost tours aren’t our topic, we are going to discuss spirit drinking tours.
Spirit is basically liquor. Vodka, gin, tequila, rum, and whiskey are all spirits. The difference between them is the way they are distilled.
Start off by researching distilleries near you.
In your spirit tour, you take your group around the distillery where someone from the distillery explains how a certain spirit is made, for example, whiskey.
They can even offer presentations or a video for guests to watch. The group gets a small glass of whiskey to taste. At some distilleries, the group can taste the depth of different flavors.
Note that you should aim at independent distilleries because they are more welcoming and can offer better quality tours.
Here’s a list of world’s best distilleries tours — check and see if they give you some additional ideas on how to create your own spirit drinking tours.
Pub Crawl Tours
For customers that want to try a variety of drinks from locally owned establishments and not specifically focus on wine or beer — organize a pub crawl tour.
A pub crawl is a bar tour or a drinking tour at a number of pubs or bars. You usually go from bar to bar in a small vicinity.
The most famous pub crawl is organized during the Christmas holiday.
It doesn’t have to be just a drinking tour, you can organize a historical walking pub tour and spicy things up with drinking games.
Remember, your customers should have fun. The idea is not to get them hammered and intoxicated but rather for them to try a sip of a few local drinks and spend time with the locals.
Besides, you know that all best friendship stories start at a pub.
When it comes to bar tours, you can create a themed tour. For instance, visit a few of the best cocktail bars or if you’re really feeling like outdoing yourself, organize a cycling pub crawl.
Tea Tasting And Travel
What do you offer customers who are not that into alcohol?
There are tons of other local beverages for them to try, but you need to find out where and then take them there.
Tea tours consist of tea tastings and a guided visit to the tea fields.
Customers get a sample set of teas to try, learn about the tea ceremony, and participate in tea-related workshops. Tourists are always interested in tea when visiting China, India, Japan, Vietnam, UK, and Korea. There are also great Middle East teas to try out as well.
Having said that, the Japanese offer tea farm tours. Since the best time to visit Japan is in spring, perhaps you can create an activity that involves tea tasting as a part of a broader Japan tour.
That way tourists can also experience what Japan has to offer and try out different tea categories such as sencha, matcha, gyokuro, bancha, genmaicha, hojicha, kukicha, tencha, organic tea, black tea, sakura, and genmai.
Coffee Tours
For serious coffee addicts and the ones that want to experience the best cup of coffee, create a lavish coffee tour.
A great way to really indulge your clients is to mix coffee tours with chocolate tours. Tours like these are mostly walking tours.
However, you can get in touch with a coffee factory and organize a complimentary factory tour for your group. Similar to beer tours, you go around the factory and the host discusses cupping, roasting and blending processes along with the company’s history.
(I wonder how hyper your customers are going to get after five cups of sampled coffee. Just saying.)
Here’s an idea:
Hawaii is a nice location to organize coffee tours namely for their Kona beans and many family-owned coffee farms. So that’s an interesting starting point you can revolve your tour around, of course depending on the destination you’re organizing tours in.
If you are a local tour guide, I’m sure you can touch people’s hearts with a passionate story about the land, history, and of course — coffee. Offer your customers to meet local people, eat home-made food and enjoy the best coffee.
What’s most important for any beverage tour, or in fact, any tour is that you ensure your customers have a great time.
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Originally published at www.orioly.com on February 21, 2018.
