What is the World Beer Tour aka WBT? It’s sort of a game at a pizza chain known as Old Chicago. For a chain pizza the price isn’t bad and the pizza is excellent. I’m sure there’s better pizza out there, I’ve certainly had better but for a chain this is wonderful. That atmosphere is good and they have a lot of beer, at least 110. The tour comprises of one successful completion of drinking all 110 beers offered at any of the restaurants. They’re given unique numbers because while all locations have the big 3 domestics there are a ton of local brews specifically offered at certain locales. I’m not sure how many different beers they offer throughout the company but given the numbering it could be as much as 1,500!! To make life a little easier and to make the tour a little more fun they offer mini-tours which are somewhere between 6-10 beers selected for a given festival like 4th of July, St. Patrick’s Day, or Oktoberfest. These beers are given different numbers in the 9,000 range in order to distinguish from the main tour because you get a prize at the end of the mini-tours (in the form of a shirt for that event.) They also count on your main tour so if you want to have the same beer again, that’s your chance to have two for your main tour. There are different milestones along the way to completing your tour, at the end you get a shirt, name on the Wall of Foam, and probably something else. You can complete the tour as many times as you want. Once you complete it 10 times (a whopping 1,100 beers and at least $5,000 later) you get a nice pewter mug which allows you to get any pint and a half beer for the price of 10 oz. That’s certainly nice but expensive. I’m at 70 beers, I had more but somehow lost a good dozen mysteriously. Once I complete it I’m done, if I even complete it. That’s a lot of money that I don’t have. :-(
The only downside to this tour is having to drink wheat beers which I can’t stand especially hefeweizen crap. Yuck.
