Denver Cocktails and History Tour

If beer tours are not your style, this small-group cocktail walk covers the other half of Denver's drinking story. Run by Delicious Denver Food Tours, it lasts about two hours and is capped at ten travelers. You meet at 1701 Wynkoop Street near the Crawford Hotel check-in desk inside Union Station, where the guide wears an orange Delicious Denver Food Tours button, and then walk to a handful of venues in the downtown core. The itinerary lists Tavernetta, The Oxford Hotel, Urban Farmer Denver and The Maven Hotel at Dairy Block, with passing stops that include the Cruise Room Bar and Wazee Street. The listing says you will taste a Brachetto spritz from a James Beard Award-winning restaurant, a Butter Pecan Old Fashioned and two craft cocktails made daily, along with housemade focaccia and marinated olives, and gratuities are included. The history thread runs from Prohibition to today, using bars and hotels as the backdrop for stories about how Denver drank. Mocktails are available on request and vegetarian bites are offered. Guests must be 21 or older, and the tour is stroller accessible but not wheelchair accessible.

The route does something useful for a visitor: it takes you inside several of the city's best-known hotel bars and restaurants, so even if you never stay at those properties you see them. The Oxford Hotel opened in 1891 and is one of the city's historic hotels, so a stop there fits the history angle neatly. Short stops, from about five to twenty-five minutes each, keep the evening moving, and the pace is closer to a progressive happy hour than a lecture.

The group cap of ten is the real selling point. Compared with a thirty-person ghost walk or a bar crawl, a table of ten lets the guide actually respond to your questions, and the venues can accommodate you without a scramble. The cocktails are the guide's picks rather than a free menu, so you will not choose your own drinks, though mocktails are available. One reviewer called the experience fun but overpriced, noting fewer stops and no choice of drink, which is a fair expectation-setting comment. The price is for a curated experience in a premium setting, not for volume.

Book this when you want a polished, social early evening in downtown Denver that is easy to follow with dinner. It pairs well with a Union Station dinner or a show at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. If you prefer a more casual, rowdier format, try the haunted pub crawls in LoDo, and if you want to focus on beer, the LoDo craft beer tour is the better match. Dress smart casual, since you will be walking between hotel lounges, and wear shoes that suit cold pavement in winter.