Smithwick's Experience, Kilkenny

Great tour, fun nosing and tasting all the ingredients, absolute gem of a guide, Katie is indeed a cutie! Keep her going 😃. Superb ales, tried the red ale, pale ale and kilkennies (red ale with nitrogen). Had very good fun, avsolutely worth the visit and detour if you hadn't planned it.

Awesome tour! Our tour guide, Darren, was full of information and answered all of our questions. He stayed around for the tasting and answered more questions. Highly recommend this tour!

The place is beautifully refurbished and transformed to an "experience" compare to the past fully functional brewery. The venue itself is very beautiful but a bit too much of technology involved. It loses the sense of the real in some points. It was Christmas Eve when we visited and you could say that our tour guide would rather be anywhere else that going around with tourists. Though, that made him to be honest and cut all the unnecessary marketing extras and be to the point. Very kindly and friendly answering anything he could and giving us a very authentic experience of the Irish hospitality without the cookie cutter corporate experience we had in Guinness factory in Dublin (same company group). Of course they beer was amazing but I would stick with the ale, the rest wasn't something special to make me order them again.

We made a last minute decision to take the tour while we were in Kilkenny at the end of July. We waited about 20 minutes until the next tour started. The Experience had just re-opened a couple weeks earlier and it had a fresh and modern feel. Our tour guide Megan was full of energy and brought the tour to life, even continuing to chat with us while we enjoyed some pints afterwards. A shout out to the staff in the gift shop as well for being lots of fun.

Good fun. Adam was a jolly guide. Nothing overly spectacular but a grand way to spend an hour in Kilkenny. When booking online they add €2 to each ticket for no apparent reason. Tried hard to find the reason for it but it wasn't documented anywhere. Ended up paying it but I would have rather kept the 6€ in my pocket instead of giving it to John Smithwick for no reason