One of the bigger “to-do” activities in Fort Collins, Colorado, is hanging out at the original New Belgium Brewing Company. There’s a bar, plenty of seating, and some branded products to buy, naturally. But there’s also a great tour of the facility, complete with plenty of beer samples. Let’s talk about it!
New Belgium Brewing Company
First, a bit about the non-factory areas – everything you can see without a tour. There’s a lovely little lawn and stage where you can play games and hear the occasional band. Outdoor seating around long fire pits sits on the right side of the lawn. To the left, there’s usually a food truck available. There seems to be a rotating cast of trucks that park there, often the same truck on the same day of the week (Friday Mexican, Wednesday pizza, etc.) There’s only one at a time, so you don’t have much choice for food, except for what day you go. Saturdays seem to rotate more broadly. (I like the Corndoggies one.)
During my Sunday trip, a mobile version of the local Mountain Cafe offered coffee drinks and breakfast and lunch sandwiches and salads. I ended up with a lamb gyro for dinner that I really enjoyed. Around the building to the left is a bocce ball court and more seating, but it was pretty iced up for the winter during my February visit.
Inside, there’s a small gift shop, a tour check-in desk, and a long bar serving (I assume) most everything they make. It seems like a pretty wide selection. You can order single beers, beer flights, or buy or refill a growler. They also seem to offer a charcuterie box, but other than that, the only food available is at whatever food truck is there that day. There’s seating along the bar, in a large room to the left, and in another room to the right. Leashed dogs are welcome inside, and there is free wifi. I saw a few students there camped out with laptops.
New Belgium Brewing Tour
The biggest draw to the New Belgium Brewing Company is probably the factory tour. It’s only $10, lasts 90 minutes, and you get several beer samples along the way!
After checking in at the entrance desk and getting your hand stamped, your tour group will gather near the entrance for your guide, who takes you outside and around through that bocce ball courtyard to a side entrance. This is Brewhouse #1 and the history hallway. Here, you’ll get a sample of New Belgium’s flagship Fat Tire Ale while your tour guide walks you through the founding of the brewery.
Next, you head up to beautiful Brewhouse #2, with wooden cathedral ceilings, lots of natural light, and tile mosaics around huge stainless steel vats. There’s a private bar up here where you pour your own this time (glass at a 45-degree angle, leave room for the head.) This time, you can choose from a few options. I went with the Trippel, my favorite of the tour. Your guide will explain the brewing process in detail here, from the yeast elevator and hot water on the far wall, through the mashing and boiling and whatever – I don’t quite remember each step now. As they talk, you can view what’s going on in each vat through a window.
The Foeder Forest
Next, you head down a lower hallway, past a fun testing lab, and into the Foeder Forest. Foeders are huge barrels repurposed from wine production. The winemakers can only use them for a couple of years before they are retired, so places like New Belgium can use them for beer indefinitely after. The kind of beer fermented in Foeders tend to be more sour. You get your third sample here – our guide promised to make us sour-loving converts…I wasn’t converted.
The Foeder warehouse goes back quite a ways, and I think I remember our guide saying it’s the biggest in the United States, or the west, or something like that. (The problem with a beer tour is that you start to lose the fine details…and yes, I am a lightweight.) Most of the barrels come from France or other wine-making regions, but your guide will point out one made new in the U.S. In the middle of the barrels, there’s a big experiment room, with bar-like windows to test new brews on employees.
Canning & Bottling (AKA the Thunderdome)
Finally, you head back outside, past the employee wellness office, and into a separate bottling building. Inside, your guide will hand out your last “sample” – in our case, a whole can of Vodoo Ranger Juice Force fresh off the line. You can look out some upper-floor windows to the bottling and canning rooms while your guide gives his final wrap-up speech about the company.
When you’re done, you head back as a group to the starting bar area. But not before offering you the chance to slide down a *very tight* spiral slide! In one of the back hallways to the bar, there’s a second-story spiral slide right in the middle of the hall. You can bypass it if you want, and you do need to climb some stairs to get to the top of the slide. In fact, there are stairs everywhere on this tour, though I think there are elevators if you need them.
Admission & Hours
The New Belgium Brewery is open to guests from noon-8 pm every day.
The 90-minute full brewery tour that I took is offered five times a day. It is very popular, so reservations are recommended. You can book them online here. Tour start times run between 12:30 and 4:30. You may get a spot as a walk-up, depending on what’s already been booked that day. Kids are welcome (and ages five and under are free), but pets are not. It costs $10 and includes all the beer samples I describe above.
There is also a free, 45-minute “tour teaser” option. It’s only at 2 pm on weekdays and 2:00 & 4:00 on weekends. And is first come, first served. No reservations are available. It does include a “free beer sampling,” so I’m not sure how much that is or where they take you. It might just be upstairs to the pretty brewery #2 and the bar there.
You can get a private brewery tour for $250 for up to 25 people. And they even do discounted educational tours for school groups.
While you can buy beers and flights at the bar, they offer a “guided tasting” with a table-side expert for $20. I’m not sure if that’s more than just a waiter or bartender, but there seems to be some history involved, if you don’t want to take the whole tour.
Parking
New Belgium Brewing is only half a mile from the center of downtown Fort Collins, or about a 10-minute walk. But there is plenty of street parking and even a nice big free parking lot across the street for any visitors.
There’s also an Asheville location that also gives brewery tours, though they’re twice as expensive at $20 a pop. I’ll be in Ashville later this year, so I might see how it compares.
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