Carlton Brewery Tour, Abbotsford

I went here with a voucher: guided tour and then samples and a pie/pastie.

It is an interesting and informative tour, where they show you the various stages of making their beer. The group was around 15 people, but there was plenty of opportunity to ask questions. Of note for tourists might be that you can't take pictures during the tour (basically to protect their workers who don't want their pictures taken).

After the tour we were taken into a private room and they brought out trays of shot glasses with various different beers in them. There were probably about 8-10 varieties, including a cider and my now personal favourite - Carlton Black (has a nice chocolatey flavour to it!). It was a help yourself kind of thing, so you could try as many as you wanted to while they were bringing random trays out and took a couple of requests before they cut us off the free samples (then you had to purchase your drinks).

I got the pastie and my boyfriend got the pie. I usually don't like pie, but I tried some of his and loved it. Avoid the pastie, it's fairly plain in comparison!

Gives you a behind the scenes tour of Carlton Brewery. It shows the history of beer and what it takes to make beer. It takes about an hour and you get to have tasting of 4 different beers. There also is cider on tap. I am not a beer drinker but the tastes were enough to know if you like the beer or not. Some would be very good in the heat of summer.

Great thing for tourists to do in Melbourne. Indeed there were people from all over the country and world. We were the only locals.

There is a shop you can buy merchandise from as well.