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BEER lovers are on the holiday of a lifetime in the US, touring pubs and bars on a Great American booze cruise. The tipple-tastic trip, masterminded by beer giants BrewDog, has seen lucky drinkers whisked off on a special plane for a four-day bender across Ohio.
But what other attractions are there for those of us who love a pint? Here JAMES MOORE serves up the beer lover’s holiday guide…
You can “wake up inside a brewery” at the world’s first beer hotel The DogHouse in Ohio, also the brainchild of ScottishAmerican firm BrewDog. The rooms come with beer taps as standard and beer stocked mini fridges in the shower, brewdog.com. HAVING IT LARGER:
Fancy a trip to a beery theme park? Look no further than Brewery Kuchlbauer’s “world of beer” which comes with a huge 70metre tower you can climb as well as bizarre, robotic beer gnomes, walls made from beer bottles and of course lots of brews to try. See kuchlbauer.de
There are lots of breweries you can tour in the UK, but what better place to start than the National Brewery Centre in Burton -upon-Trent, the home of Bass ale? There’s a museum all about how to make beer as well as its own microbrewery.
Find out about other beer making venues at ukbrewerytours.com
There are some great foreign museums dedicated to beer too. The Belgians have hundreds of different varieties of the stuff and you can sample some at The Bruges Beer Experience, mybeerexperience.com. There’s also the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam, heineken.com.
OF THIS With St Patrick’s Day coming up on March 17 no lover of the dark stuff should miss the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. It boasts seven floors of interactive attractions dedicated to the drink, the world’s largest pint glass and the famous gravity bar where you can taste a complimentary pint.
There are hundreds of beer festivals around the country, check out your local one at www.beer-festivalcalendar.co.uk.The annual Great British Beer Festival at London’s Olympia, from August 6-10, will feature a whopping 900 ales.
No self-respecting lager fan could miss a visit to the world’s biggest beer festival, Oktoberfest, in Munich, Germany, where 7.5million litres of beer are guzzled each year. Despite the name it starts on September 21.
BOOZE WHO: Britain’s traditional pubs are perfect destinations in themselves from the largest – the
11,000 sq ft Royal Pavilion in Ramsgate, Kent, to the smallest, The Nutshell in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, measuring 15ft by 7ft.
Seek out the oldest, believed to be the 8th Century Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans, Herts, or perhaps the quirkiest – the leaning Crooked House in Himley, Staffs.
TELLY HAUNTS: You can call in at the Rovers Return on an ITV tour of the Coronation Street soap set, coronationstreettour.co.uk or step behind the bar of The Woolpack on an Emmerdale studio tour, www.emmerdalestudioexperience.co.uk.
Or how about supping at an infamous boozer like The Blind Beggar in Whitechapel, east London, where gangster Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell in 1966.
There are some wild watering holes around the globe from a bar inside a
1,700-year-old Baobab tree in South Africa to the chance to knock back a beer at the bar while you revel in the thermal waters of Iceland’s Blue Lagoon, bluelagoon.com