Before my friend Graham left for Wales, we took a 4 hour food and beer tour through Munich. It was about 30 Euros and included beer and food for the tour... Completely worth it.
Our tour guide was an Australian guy who'd lived in Munich for 8 years. If you could pick anybody on Earth to lead a beer tour, this is your man. He was great at his job-- very funny and enthusiastic about it. The other people on the tour were from England, Georgia, and Alabama, so it was nice to talk with other southerners for a while.
We went through some of the older beer halls and a brewery museum, and eventually stopped to eat some traditional Bavarian food... "traditional Bavarian" might be the most used phrase in Munich. It was mostly meats and cheeses, of course the white sausages, which were pretty good. We ended at the famous Hofbrauhaus near the city center-- an old Nazi hangout where Hitler gave some speeches. Our tour guide left us here and we had a few beers with the other tourists.
The most interesting thing we learned from the tour was about the laws in Munich about beer. They still consider beer a food (liquid bread) so it's legal to drink beer just about anywhere at anytime. After the 1972 Olympics Munich got rid of public restrooms, which obviously becomes a problem when you have a bunch of beer drinkers roaming the city. Their solution was to deem any place that serves beer a public restroom, so you can just walk in a bar or restaurant to use the restroom, and walk out without buying something. Extremely useful information for someone with as small a bladder as mine.
They also were some of the earliest developers of refrigerating machines. It was not because they wanted to keep food fresh longer, but because it would allow them to brew beer all year long without having to buy expensive chunks of ice.
It's quite nice living in a city full of beer-lovers.
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