I see plenty of 5 star reviews, and I believe legitimately people have a great time on their brewery tours and party bus excursions. My 3 stars is about expectation of advertisement versus service sold. My group purchased groupons for the brewery tour, which says: "We're going to spend between 35-45 minutes at each brewery to allow you to not feel rushed at each stop. We want you to be able to sit back and enjoy your samples, then buy a pint of your favorites and refill your growlers while you're there." Based on that description, our group of four anticipated that samples would be part of the tour. Not (necessarily) so. Here's an overview of how the day went:
We arrived at Sun King a little before noon. Our group inquired with the hostess if she knew anything about Top Shelf Tours or what to expect. She told us the driver would come inside, although I'm pretty sure she was just guessing. He didn't. Pretty soon a white bus showed up outside. After sitting there a few minutes, I went out and asked if he was our driver. Yep indeed. I said, "ok, I'll go back and tell our group." He said ok!
Shortly after that, our group hopped on the bus along with 8 others. The driver gave us each a sticker to identify us as being a part of a Top Shelf Tours group. Cool. We thought that might mean something. It didn't, at least not in terms of a perk for us; more like advertising for them I think.
The driver closed the doors, jammed to his music (good taste by the way), and drove us to our first stop: St. Joseph's Brewery. I'll review St. Joseph separately. Suffice to say: the bar tender looked at us, said he didn't know anything about our tour, but they don't do anything special for groups, and they wouldn't be offering samples to our group. We were welcome to "try something" if we wanted to, but nothing different than an average bar customer. Feeling a bit misled, I called Rob from Top Shelf Tours, and he told me that he keeps St Joseph on the tour list because of the neat architecture, and "it's hard to keep up with what each of the breweries will offer" to his tour groups. I quoted his website about "enjoying samples" and suggested he provide more of a description for truth in advertisement. Help your customers know what to expect. My crew's question at that point was: how will this tour be better than/different than us having crafted our own downtown circuit and Lyfted from one place to another? The consensus among the four of us was: not much.
The driver texted us whenever we had ten minutes before the bus was supposed to head to the next stop. I poked fun with him via text, and he was a good sport. However, he really didn't know much about the breweries he was taking us to. On our way to the second brewery, someone asked him: "what's next?" He knew it was "center something... center line... center mark..." then everyone on the bus started chanting possible "center" names. It was Centerpoint, and they gave us one of the best experiences of the day. I'll review them separately, too.
We got another "10 minute warning," and soon were escorted to Garfield Brewing, which was a smaller brewery more than happy to offer a nice group experience, and finally, we were taken to Two-Deep, who also knew we were coming and had a sampling experience ready for us.
Here's my final take. Top Shelf Tours will provide a very nice shuttle service between breweries. I think it's very overstated as a "tour." The history of craft brewing in IN is super cool; it would have made an awesome tour if our driver knew something about the breweries, their histories, the kinds of beers they are known for, interesting facts about the architecture, and why Top Shelf thinks that the brewery is a worthy stop on their tour. Then again, I was thinking "tour."
If you're not thinking "tour" and just want to go have a great time visiting multiple breweries, you will have fun. I mean, there is still plenty of good beer and food available (bring $), and if you like your friends, there's no reason you shouldn't have a great time. We did, but next time, we'd probably just Lyft. The bus was nice, but there were only 4 of us. We got our tickets off Groupon, so it wasn't a bad deal, just not what we had expected or really hoped for. read more