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Luckily, the growth of the craft-beer industry has spurred the proletariat-friendly beer tour. Sure, there are downsides to brewery-touring: because barley and hops ship well, breweries are traditionally far from pastoral farms and close to ugly, industrial areas, and because artisanal-beer makers tend to be hippies, you're going to hear a lot of Grateful Dead. But there are some major upsides: you can visit breweries, unlike wineries, right in major cities; you're finished admiring the operations in 10 minutes; and instead of sipping and spitting in uptight tasting rooms, you down samples in attached...
...best place for brewery-touring is Denver, partly because of its water, partly because it's the home of Coors and partly because skier, mountain-biker and hiker dudes love them some beer. Sure, Portland, Ore., has more microbrew outlets, but many of its 46 brewhouses are brewpubs, which produce beer only for their own bars, and part of the fun of a beer tour is seeing where bottles you can buy at home are manufactured. San Diego may have a more innovative beer scene--guys experimenting with huge alcohol and huge bitterness--but it has only 28 breweries...
...Scott Kerkmans, a former brewer who was hired last year by Four Points by Sheraton to help design its Best Brews program, which puts local beers on tap in the hotel chain's bars across the country. Kerkmans, 28, also recently set up a bus tour of Denver-area breweries brewtours.com) and he invited me to some of his favorites. The thing was, I explained, I don't really like beer...
...minutes north to Longmont, near Boulder. At Left Hand Brewing Co., co-founder Dick Doore, who has a master's in mechanical engineering as well as a crazy, bushy mound of long red hair and a beard, took us behind his beautiful wooden bar and gave us a tour of the vat rooms, which were littered with copies of the New Yorker and a half-finished chess game. Afterward, I sat at the combination bar-gift shop, and Doore let me pour a cream stout that was all malty, roasty goodness...
After a few more breweries, I tried to duck out of the tour parts, since they were all the same: they smelled like baking bread, there were huge kettles where the brewers threw barley (delicious raw) and hops shaped into long-lasting pellets (not as delicious), and somewhere men at a tiny assembly line were boxing bottles and listening to the Grateful Dead...