We live near the Budweiser factory in Williamsburg, VA. While you can see the factory when you’re going in and out of Busch Gardens Williamsburg, the place is kind of like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Other than the people who work there, no one gets in and no one comes out. Meaning: you can’t take a Budweiser tour, and only very rarely can you sample the beer made within the factory.

So, when David and I visited St. Louis recently for a wedding, we decided to visit another Anheuser Busch location was within minutes of our hotel. And because we love talking about beer, learning about beer and of course, drinking beer, we rallied our friends and headed over to actually see what the inside of a Budweiser factory looked like.

What we found was a highly interactive tour with lots of knowledge on how a macro brewery works, great views of beer being made in mass quantities and plenty of samples along the way. We enjoyed our time taking a Budweiser tour so much, that I wanted to write down everything you need to know, including a walkthrough of the tour, so you can enjoy your time at the St. Louis brewery.

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St. Louis Budweiser Tour & Brewery Information

At the St. Louis location, the options for Budweiser tours are endless. Choices range from a free tour of the facility to a tour solely focused on meeting the brand’s infamous Clydesdales and dalmatians, to a full-blown brewmaster’s tour. All tours explore some portion of the facility, and all tours (even the free one) have sampling opportunities for those 21+.

Tour options can change depending on the time of year, so make sure to check BudweiserTour.com to see what they are offering when you visit.

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Budweiser Tour Options & Ticket Prices

There are multiple tour options for anyone who wants to explore the brewery. The most common tour is the “general” tour that is open to the public, doesn’t cost anything and runs every 30 minutes from

General Brewery Tour – This tour is free to the public and offered throughout the year. Of all tours this is the shortest, lasting only 45 minutes, and only gives a basic overview of the facility. This tour is free, but you can also reserve this tour ahead of time for $5 a person (but if you have the time, I’d spring an extra $5 a person and do the Day Fresh tour).

Day Fresh Tour – This tour is one step up from the free tour, lasting 75 minutes and journeying throughout the entire brewery. This was the tour we chose and what this blog post covers. We chose this tour over others because it wasn’t too long (only 75 minutes) and wasn’t too expensive (only $10 a person). For another four dollars, I also added a Budweiser-branded speed opener to our tour, which is a good (and cheap) souvenir.

Beer master Tour – This tour lasts two-plus hours and explores the brewery as a whole. Rather than just focusing on the facilities, this tour also focuses on the brewing process, showing participants how a macro brewery brews beer on a whole. The beer master tour is the most expensive option, coming in at $35/person. However, for the price, this tour includes the most samples, as well as a variety of gifts for being Budweiser’s guest.

Horses & Heritage Tour – This tour explores the most iconic part of the brewery (second to the beer): the Clydesdales and Dalmatians. This tour lets you see the animals up close, learning about why they are iconic and how keepers care for them at the St. Louis facility. The tour costs $25 but includes a sample at the end of the tour.

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Budweiser Brewery Tour Location

Public transportation – Unfortunately, public transportation does not drop off near the brewery. If you don’t have a car or your own transportation, your best bet is taking an Uber/Lyft from your hotel to the brewery. However, pickup/drop-off from the brewery is easy, with an easy-to-access

Where Anheuser Busch is located in St. Louis – Anheuser-Busch is located in the Benton Park area of St. Louis, which is on the Mississippi River and about eight miles from the center of town itself. Anheuser-Busch is also located about three miles from the arch, so don’t expect to walk there as part of your St. Louis visit. However, there is a Budweiser outpost located a few blocks from the arch if you don’t want to visit the brewery itself.

Hours – Hours vary widely throughout the year, especially during the holidays. Rather than list them here, I highly recommend you visit the tour website to see when the brewery is open.

Budweiser Biergarten

For those who want a taste of the brewery without having to go on a tour (or who want another beer after the tour), Budweiser has a Biergarten on-premise. Open to the public, you do not need to attend a tour to drink or eat here. We found the Biergarten pleasant because it was filled with a wide variety of food, all either grilled, broiled or fried in Budweiser-branded beer (I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to turn down the chance to try a Budweiser-broiled brat).

Honestly, we expected the food to be mediocre, as is the par for most chain-level restaurants. Instead, we found food that was fresh and really hit the spot after walking around for a little over an hour and a half. The place is treated as a European beer garden, so servers wander around, and you may get a variety of people helping you. Regardless, we found service to be quick and the beer and food to be fresh.

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Budweiser Brewery Tour Overview – Day Fresh Tour

While we explored the Budweiser brewery, we were able to book tickets in advance to the Day Fresh tour. We highly enjoyed this tour, as it gave a succinct introduction to the brewery, while also giving a great glimpse into the macro-brewing process itself.

Why the Day Fresh Tour

If you’re on the fence as to what tour to visit, I highly recommend the Day Fresh tour. We picked this over others because it allowed for us to get through the brewery rather quickly (we were surprised at how efficient the tour was, landing us back at the entrance in almost exactly 70 minutes), but also doing it cheaply for only $10/person.

What interested me in this tour over the others was the day-fresh beer you got on the tour. I was curious, especially on a macro level, to see if the beer tasted different (I won’t spoil your tour and tell you what it tasted like).

NOTE: Most tours are outside, so dress for the weather and wear comfortable shoes. You will walk the length of the Budweiser campus, but note that they do send a trolley to pick you up at the end and bring you back to the Biergarten.

Budweiser Lobby

As soon as we arrived, we were ushered into the Budweiser tour lobby. This area is complete with a tour check-in and a gift shop – and not much else. However, if you do arrive early, there are a few exhibits to browse through, making it easy to waste some time.  

We tried to hop out to the beer garden to grab some beers to drink on the tour but were told that already-open beers were prohibited. Luckily, the beers we grabbed cost a very high price of $2/can, so we chugged what we could and were on our way towards the day fresh beer.

Clydesdale Stables

After they took our ticket stubs for our tour time, we were on our way. The first stop included a glimpse into the Clydesdale stables. One of the first facts that our tour guide told us was that the Budweiser Clydesdales traveled an average of 300 days a year! As a human, I’m exhausted thinking about that, much less as a horse.

This location is one of two where the horses are housed in the country and the only one that is encased in brick and stained glass (there is a chandelier in the center of the stables that was built in 1885 and weighed over 700 pounds). Each of the horses’ livery is custom-made to their bodies, and horses that are chosen to be part of the fleet are picked based on an extremely strict list of qualifications.

We were able to meet a few Clydesdales that weren’t on travel, including a sweet horse named Bruce. However, I will note that as soon as we were ushered into the stable to meet Bruce, we were also ushered into the tour’s photo opp. We (begrudgingly) grabbed a photo and then explored the stables.

While we waited for the photo, this area also had exhibits explaining the brewery’s history with Clydesdales and Dalmatians. Once we entered, we were also able to take a look at the location’s collection of Budweiser carriages, including one that carried beer in the 1800s.

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Beer Production areas

Once we explored the brewery’s stables, we were then led to the beer production areas. The first place we were able to see was the aging cellar – complete with St. Louis’ iconic “Gloria” tank that supposedly helped the Blues win the Stanley Cup.

FUN FACT: Each brew tank holds over 1.2 million 12-oz beers. If you started to drink today from the brew tank, it would take you drinking one beer an hour for the next ~130+ years to drink all of the beer held in the tank.

After the aging cellar, you were then brought to the mash tank. To help the crushed grain turn in to sugar, this room was 30+ degrees warmer than outside, meaning that our tour guide rushed us through quickly, so we didn’t get hot. This was a quick spot on the tour and after this, we moved to the bottling room itself.

The bottling area is held in a building called BEVO and indicated by a fox sitting on the outside (who is also called by the same name). When we visited BEVO was down for maintenance, so we didn’t get to see any beer being bottled. However, they stated that this location does more than Budweiser and Bud Light and is known to bottle a wide variety of Budweiser-branded brews such as Elysian or Shock Top.

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After visiting BEVO, we went back down to street level and hopped on to a trolley that brought us back to the start of the tour. We even noted amongst our group that the tour itself took an almost exact 75 minutes, leaving us to enjoy our complimentary 16 oz. beer in the beer garden.

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Beer Sampling Opportunities on the Day Fresh Budweiser Tour

There were plenty of opportunities for beer samples and fresh beer on the day fresh tour. Our first sample came right after the stables and before we went up to see the mash tanks (anyone who was under 30 had to show ID before entering the building). In here, you were given the chance to try either Budweiser or Bud Light (and some enterprising few took both samples).

After exploring the mash tank (you had to throw your sample away before heading up), you then venturing to the BEVO building. From there, you headed up to the bottling facility, and we were then presented with an opportunity to taste either Bud Light or Stella Artois Cidre (they told us the sampling options vary based on what was available that day).

After the BEVO tour, we were then allowed to pluck our day fresh beer of Bud Light out of the cases sitting right next to the door. We were told that the beer had been bottled between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. that day. While this was the end of the tour, and we boarded a trolley from here, we were brought back to an outdoor bar, where we could select any 16 oz. Budweiser beer of our choice (from Bud Light and Budweiser to Shock Top, Kona Golden Wave to Elysian, Bud Amberbock and Stella Artois).

Overall, for our $10 ticket price, we were presented with two samples of beer, a day fresh Bud Light, and one full Budweiser beer of our choosing. For the money, I think I not only got it back when it came to samples, but I definitely felt I got my worth in terms of the tour itself. We finished our tour off by sipping our beers (and having a few more) in the beer garden. Because of the value presented, I would highly recommend this Budweiser tour over others, as I felt it gave you a quick, but wide-variety of chances to both sample and explore the Budweiser campus.

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Would I take the Budweiser Tour again?

Meh. Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. Honestly, I found St. Louis to be a city that was rather conquerable in just a few days. So, I don’t think I’d even go back to St. Louis if given the opportunity. BUT if I did find myself there, then I might find myself back at the brewery; but I would not take a tour again and would probably only grab a beer or two in the Biergarten. Rather, I can see myself trying out the local craft beer scene (of which there was plenty in St. Louis and none of which we got to try except for Schlaflys, but only at the airport).

However, I do think that the tour is worth going once, especially if you want to see a macro brewery (which is a rare thing with all of the microbreweries around the country now). The best part of the tour was the free samples and getting to try a “day fresh” beer, and I will probably share that fun fact with anyone who orders a Bud Light within my vicinity in the near future.

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Any Questions?

I hope this guide helped you with what to expect during your Budweiser tour. If you still have questions, feel free to ask in the comments and I will get back to you ASAP!

Want to see more of our time in St. Louis? Take a look at my Instagram stories (under the name “St. Louis”) and you can see more of the activities we did in St. Louis (which included more than the Budweiser tour!)

Have you been to the Budweiser factory? What did you like about your tour? Or do you want to take a trip to the place where Bud Light is brewed? Comment below – I want to hear about your story!

And don’t forget to save this post for later via the images below.