We’ve had a beer or two on our day and have been on a few brewery tours. While we were in Copenhagen, we toured Carlsberg.
Carlsburg had several things going for it. It has decent beer (sorry Heineken). It has a nice campus. It has a decent place to sit and drink your free beers. One of the best parts of the tour was the Guinness (ironic) Book of Records certified world’s largest collection of unopened beer bottles (currently +/- 20,000). The other nice part was the history of the company and it’s role in Danish society.
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| Sorry, I couldn’t fit them all in. Not even close. |
They have a copy of The Little Mermaid Statue. The family commissioned the one in the harbor. You get to see a bunch of old machinery and, like the Budweiser tour, there are stables with horses (no horses in the stables on the Heineken tour).
Several things go into making a good tour. We enjoy a tour and here are some easy ways to make a factory/product tour better:
- Show funny old commercials. Even ones that the suits setting up the tour don’t think are funny.
- Have a location with a view. Look out over mountains, the sea, the city, even a garden. Guinness does a good job with this. Their Gravity Bar has the best view of Dublin.
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| The second best part of the Guinness tour |
- Provide plenty of silly photo ops.
- Try not to be as obvious about making it a giant commercial for your product. Yes, Guinness Tour I am talking to you. Miller, please pay attention as well. World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, you might be a lost cause.
- Have knowledgeable people who can actually answer questions about the product. Olde Mecklenburg, Thomas Creek and lots of American microbrews do this well.
- If at all possible, try to show production. We eat it up. I’m not sure if you can still do it, but you used to be able to do this at Yuengling and some of the Milwaukee breweries.
schwingeninswitzerland 