Brewery Tours

Night-out groups split fairly evenly between Friday and Saturday, with a median group of fourteen. Brewery groups have more freedom than that, because taprooms are at their best in daylight.

A Saturday at one o'clock or a Sunday at noon is not competing with the evening bookings that fill a fleet. And since Friday and Saturday take about four fifths of the dates we are asked for, a Sunday or weekday tour gives you the run of the place.

Fourteen people is the one size where the vehicle choice is genuinely open, with party buses and Sprinter limos both common. For beer, the 14-passenger limo Sprinter parks more easily in the small lots that come with converted warehouses and old neighborhood buildings. The 18-passenger party bus gives you room for a cooler, growlers, and the friend who signs up late.

Four hours suits beer well. Forty-five minutes per taproom plus ten or fifteen between them gets you three stops comfortably, or four if they are close. A route that crosses the Valley will not fit, which is the whole point of the next section.

Stay in one part of the Valley and the day works. Here is the shape of the map:

Two adjacent clusters combine fine. Tempe to downtown Phoenix is about fifteen minutes, Tempe to downtown Gilbert about twenty. Scottsdale to Gilbert is thirty or more, and at that point you are paying for highway. Lay your stops out in the route planner and check each leg in the drive time calculator. Groups based in Tempe or Gilbert can build a whole afternoon without touching a freeway.

Many of the Valley's best breweries are small rooms. Fourteen people arriving unannounced on a Saturday can take every open seat, and some taprooms will politely tell a group that size there is no space.

• Call or email each brewery a week out. Ask whether they take groups of your size, whether they can hold a table or part of the patio, and whether they have a policy on buses. A few neighborhood spots limit large-vehicle groups, and it is much better to know beforehand.
• Check the hours. Taprooms close earlier than bars. Plenty stop pouring at nine or ten, and Sunday hours are shorter still.
• Order flights at the first stop and pints after. Flights for fourteen take a bartender twenty minutes. Doing it once is a great experience. Doing it four times is the afternoon.
• Put one person on tabs. Fourteen separate checks add about fifteen minutes per brewery, which costs you a whole stop. One card and a settle-up later with the split cost calculator keeps things moving.

Be the group they would have back. Tip well, stack your glasses, leave when you said.

Eat at stop two. A tour that starts at one o'clock with no food plan is in trouble by 3:30. Several Valley breweries have full kitchens and others host food trucks on weekends. Choose one with real food, put it second, and give it an hour. The timeline planner will show you what that does to the rest.

Respect the patio. From October through April, brewery patios are the best seats in the Valley. From June through September, an afternoon on an unshaded patio with high-gravity beer is a dehydration problem with a pint glass in front of it. In summer, pick taprooms with real indoor space, keep water on the bus and drink a bottle on every leg.

Watch the ABV. Arizona brewers make excellent double IPAs and barrel-aged stouts at nine percent and up. Four of those is not the same afternoon as four lagers.

Most groups leave with cans. Crowlers, four-packs and the occasional growler add up fast across fourteen people, and they need somewhere to go that is not on the floor between your feet.

Tell us you expect to be buying when you request your quote, and ask about the on-board policy for carrying beer, opened or otherwise. It is a short answer and it is better in writing than assumed.

A few other things worth asking about in the same message:

• Whether a cooler can come aboard, and where it rides.
• What happens if the group wants to add a fourth stop on the day.
• How the driver handles a taproom with no room to pull in.

If the group wants to keep going once the taprooms close, our bar crawl page covers evening routes, and anyone who would rather be drinking something else should look at the wine tours page.

Here is a Tempe day that works, with real numbers you can move around.

• 12:30, pickup. One address. Everyone meets there, nobody gets collected from four driveways.
• 1:00, first taproom. Flights all round, 45 minutes. This is the stop where you taste, so make it the one with the widest tap list.
• 2:00, the food stop. A full hour. Order for the table if the kitchen will do it, because fourteen separate entrées take forever.
• 3:15, third stop. Pints, not flights. Forty-five minutes.
• 4:15, last stop or head home. If everyone is still going strong, one more nearby. If not, end early and nobody minds.

That is four hours from the first pickup, and it leaves the evening open for dinner. Drop your own version into the route planner and you will see immediately whether a fourth stop fits or whether it just costs you the food hour.

A West Valley or Queen Creek group should add an hour for the drive in, or stay local instead. Neighborhood breweries in Glendale and Peoria make a perfectly good afternoon without a freeway.