Last weekend, theCityMoms booked the entire bus for $19.09 per person. If you book the entire 12 person bus, it is a DEAL! Darryl will pick you up in ANY location in Hamilton County so he drove right up to my house. It was awesome!
To start, he does a brief introduction to what we are going to do, which breweries we are going to visit (a list of 8 are associated with his tour). We go to the ones that can accommodate us and that are open (we went on Sunday). He chooses and we get on the road. There is a waiver to sign, some good pretzel snacks to eat and some good beer to drink during the tour. It's pretty fantastic.
I must admit, I get out and about a lot and I just love when I "find" something special about my city. This is one of them. TOP notch organization, associated with some fantastic breweries throughout the city who were fabulous and accommodating. I loved how organized we were the entire time, with countdowns to when we had to leave each location so we could stay on time. This can be a challenge with 12 moms who are away from their kiddos for the afternoon.
We started off at Barley Island, which was by far my least favorite stop. I think it's b/c the servers didn't really tell us anything about the brew. They just dropped off pitchers and left the area. We served ourselves and enjoyed the time there but I was glad it was short. It would have been nice to get a "true" experience but they clearly weren't interested in an upsell. So we moved on quickly. The 2nd stop was Grand Junction and this ranked up there with great. While we didn't get a lot of info on the beer, I just loved this brewery/bar/restaurant. We got some fried pickles and ordered an actual beer. Our servers were AWESOME and got us in and out and snacking on the apps very efficiently and allowed us to "take over" for the 30 minutes we were there. Great experience!
The next stop was Upland in Carmel and it was MY FAVORITE STOP. The guys at Upland gave us some large pours, the MOST tastings and went into a TON of detail about each taste. The folks at the bar got to hear the whole spiel too and it was really cool to hear all about the history of the beer and why each beer was chosen for us to taste and what we could expect to taste while we were drinking it. I also loved that it was $2 pints! We were all happy to order more beer here!
The final stop was the Union Brewing company. They had some good beer here too, but I think we annoyed the server. Sucks to be last stop when most of us don't drink and by this time were really quite rowdy. Darryl handled us in stride and it was an incredibly fun afternoon with my girlfriends on the beer bus!
Tips - you can bring booze on the bus as long as it's a beer purchased at the brewery and he keeps coolers on the bus if you want to buy and bring home a growler.
You can have food/snacks on the bus which is awesome since you are on a tight schedule, so get it to go and enjoy between stops.
It would be amazing for a couples day out, birthday party, bachelorette/bachelor party. It's a very affordable fun experience. I would DEFINITELY do it again! read more