A Master Cicerone Walks You Between Two Bozeman Breweries
Two taprooms a block apart, and a guide whose job is teaching you to read a beer menu anywhere else.
Bozeman's brewing district sits north of Main Street, in a run of warehouses and metal-sided buildings along North Broadway and North Plum. Montana keeps 12.2 craft breweries for every 100,000 adults of drinking age, third-highest of any state. This corner is where Bozeman keeps its share. Two of the breweries here stand close enough to walk between in about two minutes.
This tour puts a Master Cicerone in the taproom with you at both of them. The operator, Rich Higgins, holds the Cicerone program's highest certification, and he was the third person ever to earn it; the program's own directory currently lists 29 holders worldwide. He pours nothing himself. The work is explaining what is in the glass, and teaching you to order well after the tour ends.
The group forms on the sidewalk outside Bozeman Brewing Co. at 504 North Broadway Avenue. Departures run 90 minutes on a fixed schedule, and every person in the party has to be 21 or over.
Bozeman Brewery HopNinety minutes, two breweries one block apart, four 4-oz pours at each, and a hot appetizer from the second kitchen.www.viator.comEight Small Pours, Chosen Two Ways
Each stop carries a flight of four 4-oz samples, which adds up to 32 ounces across the tour. You pick the four yourself, or hand the list to Rich and let him build the flight around what you tell him you like.
The second route is the more useful one for anyone who cannot yet predict what they enjoy. He reads the taplist out loud, translates the style names, and points at the two or three lines that actually tell you how a beer will taste. That skill travels. Leaving able to navigate a beer menu in any city is the stated point of the whole thing.
Both lists have medals on them. Bozeman Brewing has poured since 2001 and calls itself the city's original craft brewery; its Plum St. Porter took World Beer Cup gold in 2022. Mountains Walking took silver in 2023 for an experimental IPA, in a category where no gold went out that year. Taplists rotate, so neither of those two is promised on the day you come.
Past the Taproom Door, Onto the Brewhouse Floor
At Mountains Walking, which Gustav Dose founded and still runs as director of brewing, the group goes past the taproom door and onto the production floor. Rich brewed professionally in San Francisco for most of a decade before he started guiding, twice as a brewmaster, so he reads a brewhouse from the inside.
What you walk into is 7,000 square feet built around a ten-barrel brewhouse with two mash tuns, which lets two styles run at once. Further in there is an open coolship room, where wort is left exposed to pick up whatever yeast and bacteria are in the air, and two 1,000-gallon cypress foeders for the mixed-fermentation beers. That equipment is the reason the taplist reads the way it does.
You handle the raw material directly. Barley malts come out to taste, which is the fastest way to understand where color and sweetness in a finished beer come from, and hops get passed around to smell. The second flight follows, sitting down in the taproom.
One Block, and Something Hot to Eat
The move between breweries is a two-minute walk of roughly one block, from North Broadway over to 422 North Plum Avenue. No vehicle, no transfer, no waiting. The schedule puts 40 minutes in the first taproom and 45 in the second.
One hot appetizer from the Mountains Walking kitchen is included, and it lands with the second flight. That kitchen runs a wood-fired oven and keeps its own short menu, opening at 11:30am daily. Anything else off that food menu goes on a tab you open at the table.
Group Size, Age, and the Drinks Rule
Groups cap at 12 people, a guide leads it in person, in English, and every traveler has to be 21 or over. There is one adult price and no younger age band to book into. Walking is limited to that single block, which keeps the physical demand low.
The drinks allowance is narrow, and it is the one line to read before booking:
- 32 oz of beer in total, as two flights of four 4-oz pours
- The tour covers the listed tastings only. Seltzer, wine, and additional beer are neither included nor permitted during the tour.
- The flights are chosen from each brewery's own taplist
A party expecting an open-ended bar crawl is reading the wrong tour.
📍 The tour starts on the sidewalk outside Bozeman Brewing Co., 504 North Broadway Avenue, Bozeman. Street parking runs along both Avocado Street and North Broadway.
From there it is a single block on foot to the second taproom, and the whole route stays inside that one corner of the brewing district.
Both taprooms keep their own hours if you want to go back without a guide. Bozeman Brewing is open seven days a week and closes at 8pm. Mountains Walking runs daily from 11:30am to 9pm, with last call for food at 8:45pm.