Thirds, not pints
Third-of-a-pint measures across eight or nine beers. You taste far more, learn far more, and finish the day in a fit state to enjoy your evening.
Bristol's original beer tasting experience
We've been running the Bristol Craft Beer Experience since 2016. One tour, done properly, in a city that deserves it.
Who we are
A beer tour company that only runs one tour in Bristol
Bristol Brewery Tours is the Bristol arm of UK Brewery Tours, which has been running guided beer experiences around the country since 2014. We came to Bristol in 2016 and have been sailing, walking and tasting our way around the city ever since.
We could sell you six different tours. We deliberately don't. There is one public Bristol tour, it runs on selected Saturdays, and every part of it exists because it earns its place — the boat because Bristol's beer story is a harbour story, Moor because it's one of the best independent breweries in the country, King Street because there is nowhere better in the city to end an afternoon.
Everything else — the private versions, the corporate days, the stag and hen groups — is that same tour, shaped to fit whoever's booked it.
- 2014
- UK Brewery Tours founded
- 2016
- First Bristol tour
- 5.0★
- Average guest rating
- 81
- Reviews and counting
Our guides
People who actually know beer
Across the UK Brewery Tours network our guides include Cicerone-certified beer sommeliers, IBD-qualified brewers, beer writers and World Beer Awards judges. Several of them brew themselves. All of them have opinions, and none of them will make you feel stupid for asking a basic question — which, in beer, is a rarer quality than it should be.
What we look for is the ability to make four hours fly by for a group where one person has a shelf of tasting notebooks and another came because their friend booked it. That's a harder skill than knowing the IBU of a west coast IPA, and it's the one that makes the tour work.
How we run tours
Four things we're stubborn about
Not a pub crawl
There's real content in the guiding — brewing, history, styles, why Bristol is the way it is. If you want drinking games, we'll happily point you elsewhere.
Everything included
All the beer, all the food, one price. Nobody's rummaging for a card at the third stop and nobody's quietly worked out they've spent double what they expected.
Local independents only
Every venue we take you to is an independent business we'd drink in ourselves. We're not selling you a route past whoever paid the most.
Why the boat
Because Bristol's beer story starts on the water
Bristol brewed because Bristol was a port. Ships needed beer, dockworkers needed pubs, and the breweries went up where the water was. The Floating Harbour — engineered in the early 1800s so ships would stay afloat whatever the tide was doing — is the reason the city looks the way it does.
So we start there. Thirty minutes on a ferry we've booked out for the afternoon, a beer in your hand, the old brewery sites going past, and your guide setting up everything you'll taste later. It costs us more than starting in a bar would. It's also the bit people talk about afterwards.
The wider network
Part of UK Brewery Tours
Bristol Brewery Tours is one city in a network that's been running beer experiences since 2014 — London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Lewes, Kent and beyond, plus private group tours in cities across the UK and Europe.
It's why our gift vouchers work anywhere, why we can put a guide in front of a group at short notice, and why a company booking an away day in Bristol this year can book one in Manchester next.
Come and see what we mean
Selected Saturdays, four hours, everything included. The rest is just talk until you're on the boat.