A brewery is a place where beers are brewed. That’s right, they did not just fall from the heavens. They’re a great place to try a few different beers and also to learn about your favourite drop.
The Guinness Brewery in Dublin, Ireland
This seven floor pint glass shaped museum is the tallest building in Dublin. The top floor is a 360 degree view of Dublin where you get to enjoy a pint. They don’t actually brew within the museum, but they teach everything to do with Guinness there. Guinness used to make more than just porter stout, but decided to concentrate their brewing. I learned that half a pint of Guinness was given to people who gave blood because of the drink’s high iron content. No wonder the old slogan was ‘Guinness is good for you’.
The Heineken Experience in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
This ‘brewery’ goes beyond museum and calls itself an ‘experience’. Basically, it has a lot of interactive activities that have very little to do with beer. Windowless rooms with laser works and touch screens. Guinness was more about old collectible memorabilia and retro ads as well as an overall explanation of how the beer is made. Heineken had the explanation, but the real highlight in both is tasting the beers. Somehow they always taste better when you’ve been talking about them for over an hour. Here I learned how to pour and sip a beer properly. You need to make sure you have the right amount of foam to seal in the flavour, but when you sip you need to sip through the foam and not just get the foam in your mouth. When that happens, you only get a bitter taste. This is what people unfamiliar to beer drinking often do and why they don’t usually like the taste. This tour was all gimmicks with a canal ride at the end and everything.
The XXXX Brewery in Brisbane, Australia
This is an actual working commercial sized brewery. On a weekday, you can see the assembly line moving, bottles rattling through the almost fully automated network of conveyor belts filling a whole warehouse. Here I learned that Castlemaine brewery makes James Squire, Hahn, Tooheys as well as the Queensland favourite Castlemaine XXXX Gold. I learned that a lot of water is needed, so a separate water distillery can be seen on site. I also learned that the different breweries give yeast extract to Vegemite. So Vegemite ends up with lots of different beers in it. That’s why no two pots are ever the same. This brewery had a lot of beers to taste in the end and you actually see a working brewery as well as some old memorabilia.
Murray’s Brewery in Port Stephens, Australia
Murray’s is certainly smaller than Castlemaine, but is also a working brewery. It’s only a two hour drive from Sydney, located in a winery. It is made up of a bistro style restaurant and bar about the size of a suburban home. A metal shed a little bit behind the bar hosts the actual brewery itself. The tour is brief and totally gimmick free. They just tell you what its made of and a little bit of history. Really, this tour is about getting your questions answered. I learned that wort leftovers are sold to cattle farms and that hops are related to cannabis.