People travel to Bristol for our tour from Cardiff, Bath, London and further, and the ones who get the most out of it treat the four hours as the centrepiece of a day rather than the whole of it. The good news is that everything worth doing sits within about twenty minutes' walk of where the tour starts and ends.
Before: the morning
Eat something substantial
This is the single most useful piece of advice on this page. The tour includes cheese and charcuterie platters, but they're nibbles at the last stop — you'll be on a boat with a beer in your hand from midday, and arriving on an empty stomach is a false economy.
St Nicholas Market in the old city is the obvious answer: a covered Victorian market with a dense run of food stalls, and about ten minutes from the harbour. Wapping Wharf, a stretch of harbourside shipping-container units full of independent restaurants and cafés, is the other. Either sets you up properly.
An hour on the harbourside
If you're arriving early, the walk along the Floating Harbour toward the meeting point is genuinely one of the nicest half-hours in the city, and it's free. You'll pass the cranes and sheds that made Bristol a port, which is useful context for everything your guide is about to tell you.
- SS Great Britain — Brunel's iron steamship, in the dry dock she was built in. It's the harbourside's headline attraction and worth more than an hour if you have it.
- M Shed — the city's own museum, in a former dockside transit shed. Free to enter, and the fastest way to understand why Bristol looks the way it does.
- Arnolfini and Watershed — contemporary art and independent cinema respectively, both right on the water, both fine places to lose an hour with a coffee.
Getting to the meeting point
We meet outside Outside The Grain Barge, Hotwell Road, Bristol BS8 4RU. It's roughly 20 minutes on foot from Bristol Temple Meads, or a short bus or taxi ride. The boat leaves at midday and cannot wait, so build in a buffer — a missed ferry is the one thing on the day we can't fix.
After: the afternoon and evening
We finish at around 4pm at The Beer Emporium, 13–15 King Street, Bristol BS1 4EF, in the middle of the old city. This is deliberate. King Street is a short cobbled run of timber-framed and Georgian buildings with one of the densest concentrations of good drinking anywhere in England, and being released onto it at four in the afternoon is a fine position to be in.
Stay exactly where you are
Most groups do. The Beer Emporium's cellar vaults are already open around you, our guests get a discount on their pizza, and there are several more bars within about ninety seconds' walk. There is no shame whatsoever in simply not leaving.
The rest of King Street and the old city
The street itself takes about two minutes to walk end to end and rather longer to drink. The Bristol Old Vic is on it — the oldest continuously working theatre in the English-speaking world — and if you've planned ahead, an evening performance after a beer tour makes for a very good day indeed.
Wander five minutes further and you're in the old city proper: Corn Street, St Nicholas Market again, and the lanes around them.
If you want dinner
Wapping Wharf is about a ten-minute walk back toward the water and has the widest run of independent restaurants in one place. The old city and Stokes Croft, a little further north, both have plenty too. Book if it's a Saturday — Bristol fills up.
If you're making a weekend of it
Sunday is for the parts of Bristol that aren't the centre:
- Clifton — the suspension bridge, the observatory, and a village of Georgian terraces above the gorge. The walk across the bridge is the postcard for a reason.
- Bedminster and North Street — south of the water, home to Bristol Beer Factory, and covered in some of the best street-art murals in the country.
- Stokes Croft — the city's most argumentative square mile, and where most of the street art people come to photograph actually is.
- East Bristol — if you want more beer, our self-guided brewery trail guide covers the cluster of working breweries a mile east of the centre.
A sample Saturday
- 10:30am — Breakfast and a wander St Nicholas Market or Wapping Wharf, then the harbourside walk west toward Hotwell Road.
- 11:45am — Meet your guide Outside The Grain Barge. The boat casts off at midday.
- Midday–4pm — The tour Harbour cruise, Moor Brewery, then King Street.
- 4pm — Stay on King Street The Beer Emporium is already open around you and the discount on pizza is real.
- 7pm — Dinner or a show Wapping Wharf for food, or the Bristol Old Vic if you booked.
The four hours in the middle
A private harbour boat with tastings on board, a behind-the-scenes brewhouse tour at Moor, and a beer flight with cheese and charcuterie under King Street. £69 a head, everything included, selected Saturdays.
Opening hours, menus and programmes at the places mentioned here change regularly — check directly before you build a day around any one of them.
