Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco Tour Review

Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco is a traditional brewery that has been hand-making beer since 1896. The brewery is open for tours so that visitors can learn the history of the company and gain a better understanding of how their beer is made. The brewery offers a limited number of tours and they fill early in advance so be sure to make reservations well in advance if you want to visit Anchor Brewing. The building is located in the Potrero Hill area of San Francisco.

There are two tours offered each weekday and you must have a reservation to take one. You can call 415-863-8350 to make reservations. Currently, their tours are full and they are taking reservations for two months from now. You can also call a day or two in advance of when you wish to visit to see if there are any cancellations.

The tour of the brewery is offered for free. It lasts for about 45 minutes and walks through the building. Staff will give you a history of the company and then explain how their beer is made as you walk past the machinery. Our tour guide seemed to be very knowledgeable and did a good job of answering crowd questions. She was also funny so even the history part was entertaining.

There is memorabilia and old bottles scattered throughout the area which are interesting to look at. The tour shows you how the beer is both made and bottled. Everything really is done right there for this small craft brewery so you get to see the whole process from start to finish. You can even smell the mash when you get out of your car outside.

A tasting of their beer is offered after the tour. You must take the tour to get to the sampling. The whole process altogether took us about two hours. Children are allows on the tour but they cannot sample the beer at the end. We were able to sample six different beers during our visit. This is a good selection because I believe they own brew eight different varieties. The samples are four ounces each. I liked most of the varieties and sampling them all allowed me to choose what I wanted to drink when we went out that evening.

Overall, I really enjoyed this tour because it was informative and fun. I liked getting to see the entire process so that now I really know what goes into the making of my beer.