A visit to the carlsberg brewery

1/25/2017

Last October, I had the pleasure of (for the first time!) giving someone a trip as a present! For my boyfriend's birthday, I decided to take him "next door" to Copenhagen. Even though I have been there countless times before, as it’s just a few hours by train from Stockholm, it was hard to contain my excitement while telling him, and we immediately started planning. We quickly decided that we would visit one of the most iconic beer breweries in the world.

I'm not a big beer-drinker, and to be honest, I didn't even know that Carlsberg was Danish, but it still seemed like a fun thing to do. So on our second day in Copenhagen, after sleeping in and hitting the breakfast buffet as hard as we could, off we went to Carlsberg! It was a rainy and gloomy morning, but when you're in the midst of a perfect week-end in a foreign city, who cares right? We arrived at the big gates at the same time the beer tasting was starting, but with a little sweet talk about a missed alarm and a birthday, the girl kindly let us join the group anyways.

We walked into a cold and humid room with a metal ceiling just as it began pouring rain outside and the guide almost had to shout so that we could hear him. Which just added to the experience, of course. He talked about the history and explained the difference between different beers and how they are made. We also got to smell and taste three different beers while he talked us through the different flavors we should be searching for.

And when I say try, I mean we got 1-2 glasses filled to the brim with beer. After the first bottle we tasted, I was already a little tipsy. The best surprise we had, was that we were the first group that year who got to try their annual Christmas beer (which for a lover of all things Christmas, was a definite highlight!). He later gave us a tour of the brewery while explaining the different stages of the production.

After about 45 minutes the guided part of the tour was finished and we made out way to the museum, beer in hand. There was a lot of information to read but equally much to just look at, so we casually made our way through the museum and the world’s largest bottle collection while talking about the beer tasting. In the reasonable price of 17 euros we also receive two drink tickets which we could cash out at the gift shop or while walking around the gardens and stables.

We were there around two hours (the beer tasting started at 12:00) so this was such a good way to start our trip. Like I said, I am not the biggest fan of beer, but I enjoyed every minute of it and my boyfriend loved it.