Brewery Tours

That's a bit like asking how long it takes to drink a pint of beer! It all depends on the venue and the programme offered. In essence, they last at least an hour and all include plenty of time to ask questions, as well as the all-important tasting part of the tour too.

A brewery is where beer is made. Ingredients including malt, barley and hops come in, they're mixed together with water, they ferment and then all that lovely beer is bottled or put into kegs and then sent out to shops, bars, pubs and supermarkets to be sold, served and drunk. These tours lift the lid on how your beer is brewed from start to finish and it's is fascinating stuff.

Brewery tours and tastings are excellent value for money. We've got visits to breweries around the country that come in at under £20, making them a great choice for group outings.

CAMRA the Campaign for Real Ale penned this term to refer to beers that are made using traditional ingredients, which is naturally carbonated. It's often conditioned in wooden casks and served using hand pumps in pubs.

As well as tours and tastings, we also offer beer-making courses for you where you will indeed learn how to make your own beer. The sessions are very much hands-on and you'll get to join in with all the processes.

You will certainly have a good idea of how your favourite tipple is made! Of course breweries brew on much larger scales than homebrewers do and to make beer at home you need to correct kit and ingredients, but a brewery tour might well inspire you.

No. The multinational brewing companies are huge industrial operations where thousands of litres of beer are produced every hour. These sort of places are not normally open to the public to visit. We concentrate more on craft brewers, where the emphasis is very much on taste and quality, with a lot of love and time put into making their beloved brews. Often family affairs for generations or young startups, they give a real insight into the craft and micro brewing industries in the UK.

Yep you certainly will! With any luck, you'll also get to munch on some malt and sniff those heady hops too. It's all part of finding out what goes into your pint of beer.

For a brewing course it's best to wear old clothes you don't mind getting hops on, combined with a pair of wellies or old trainers. For the tours and tastings, wear comfortable clothes for a factory visit, so no open-toed shoes for example.

This very much depends on the venue and the experience. The hands-on brewing workshops tends to operate with smaller group sizes, whilst the tours and tastings can cope with larger groups of up to 30 or so at the top end of the scale.