TRAVEL GUIDE

Wisconsin Travel and Sprecher Brewery

Sprecher Brewery is an American brewery in Milwaukee, providing interesting beers and tasting on your Wisconsin travel adventure. Perhaps the brewery is best known for its premium sodas, Sprecher Root Beer and Orange Dream are staples in Milwaukee and something you must try on your Wisconsin travels. In fact, the company brews more roots beer than any all of their other beers combined.

The brewery was founded in 1985 by Randal Sprecher to produce beers and sodas. Since it opened, it has moved to nearby Glendale in Milwaukee County. The first ten years the company was in business was very profitable, so they had to move to a larger location just outside of Milwaukee. Brewing in Milwaukee has always had a long history, even before it was a territory of the Untied States. As you may learn on your Wisconsin travels, by the late 1890s nearly every community in the state had at least one operating brewery. Now that is a lot of beer! But Prohibition hit the area hard. Most of the breweries were forced to close, and only the largest had a diverse product line that helped them survive.

Today, the brewing business is competitive. Beers that are mass marketed lose many of the distinctive features that regional beers have. At the same time, the micro-breweries need to price their products a little higher, although they usually have more specialized products.

Beer

All year, the brewery produces five of its beers. They include the Special Amber, Black Bavarian, Hefe Weiss, Pub Ale, and Abbey Triple. There are also seasonal beers, depending on when you visit on your Wisconsin travel adventure. There is the Irish Stout, Mai Bock, India Pale Ale, Oktoberfest, Dopple Bock, Imperial Stout, and the Winter Brew.

Sodas

The sodas produced here are even more popular than the beer, especially the Root Beer, which uses honey as its primary ingredient to separate it from its competitors. They also make cream soda, puma kola, orange dream, ginger ale, Lo-Cal root beer, and ravin' red.

Seeing the facilities

You can arrange a tour of the brewery while you travel through Wisconsin. These take place all year, at four times of the day depending on the season, production runs, and holidays. The tour is $3 for adults, $2 for seniors, and $1 for those under 21.

The tour will take you through the brew house where all of the beers are produced. The guide will explain the whole process, then take you though the refrigerated cellar where the products are stored until they are bottled. Next stop on your Wisconsin travel is the warehouse. Finally, you get to the best part of the tour: all adults (21+) get four samples of beer, as well as unlimited soda samples for everyone.