Around The World Pub Crawl 2027

We meet at Heathrow at an entirely civilised hour. Everyone arrives freshly showered, correctly dressed and carrying carefully packed luggage. Somebody has even brought a travel pillow. It's adorable.

Towards midday we leave Britain and land in Brussels, where the Belgians have spent centuries quietly perfecting the art of producing beers strong enough to tranquilise agricultural animals while serving them in beautiful little glasses so nobody gets suspicious.

We'll dump the bags at the hotel and head into the city for our opening crawl through old cafés, beer halls and some of Brussels' legendary drinking establishments.

This is Belgium, so ordering "a beer" is merely the beginning of negotiations. Would you like Trappist? Lambic? Gueuze? Dubbel? Tripel? Something brewed by monks? Something fermented by wild yeast? Something served in a glass that appears to have been designed by NASA?

By bedtime everyone will have chosen a favourite Belgian beer and forgotten how to pronounce it.

Countries visited: 1. Confidence: dangerously high.

There's time for a lazy Brussels morning before our late afternoon flight to Prague. This is when the economics of the expedition suddenly improve.

We have arrived in the Czech Republic, a country where people take beer very seriously but don't appear to have informed their accountants. After Brussels, the first Czech beer bill may cause members of the group to assume the waiter has forgotten to charge for several drinks. He hasn't.

Tonight we disappear into Prague's old pubs and beer halls for beautifully kept Czech lager, dark beer, enormous plates of food and our first opportunity to completely fail at pronouncing Na zdraví!

Somewhere around pint three, somebody will announce that we should stay in Prague for the remaining twelve days.

Request denied. We've got a planet to get around.

Today we have Prague properly.

We'll wander the old streets, investigate historic beer halls, find tank beer so fresh it practically has a birth certificate and squeeze in just enough culture to allow everyone to tell relatives back home that this is actually an educational tour.

The afternoon is deliberately relaxed because tonight the trip changes gear.

This evening, we board our flight to Dubai. This is our first overnight flight, which means the hotel tonight has several hundred seats, two wings and a gentleman pushing a trolley through the bedroom. Sleep well. Tomorrow gets expensive.

We land in Dubai at early morning, looking remarkably glamorous for people who have slept sitting upright.

Welcome to a city of seven-star hotels, indoor ski slopes, artificial islands, supercars and drinks menus capable of making grown adults quietly check their bank balance.

During the day we'll explore some of Dubai before beginning one of the most challenging missions Tipple Tours has ever attempted: FIND A REASONABLY PRICED BEER IN DUBAI. We will search hotels. We will investigate happy hours. We will follow suspiciously cheerful expatriates. Someone will eventually find a pint for £6 and be carried through the streets as a hero.

It's an early-ish finish tonight because at 01:55 we're flying again!

By now the travel pillow has stopped looking ridiculous.

Early morning arrival in n Sri Lanka.

The temperature rises. The food gets spicier. Tuk-tuks appear. And our carefully constructed European understanding of drinking culture is introduced to arrack.

Sri Lankan arrack is traditionally distilled from the fermented sap of coconut flowers. This sounds charming and botanical, which is exactly how dangerous drinks introduce themselves.

We'll explore Colombo, eat ridiculously good Sri Lankan food, drink cold Lion Lager and undertake a responsible investigation into arrack. The first glass will be educational. The second will be cultural. Anything after that is anthropology.

By evening somebody will look at the itinerary and say, "Hang on, weren't we in Dubai this morning?" Yes. Please try to keep up.

We've deliberately given Sri Lanka another day because arriving somewhere, drinking a beer and immediately fleeing to the airport isn't travelling. It's an international pub version of supermarket sweep.

Today we slow things down. Markets, colonial history, local food and whatever strange corners of Colombo we discover along the way.

There may also be further arrack research because scientific results must be reproducible.

Late evening we will head back to the airport for another overnight flight.

By now airport security has become routine. Shoes off. Laptop out. Liquids in bag. Dignity in tray.

Next stop: Malaysia.

We arrive early morning. Nobody knows whether they want breakfast, dinner or intravenous coffee. Welcome to Kuala Lumpur.

Today brings enormous towers, chaotic streets, brilliant food and the increasingly strange sensation of having lived several separate holidays during the same week.

We'll explore the city before spending the evening bouncing between hawker food, bars and local drinking spots beneath the lights of KL.

At some point somebody will open Google Maps and zoom out. This is a mistake. Europe is now very, very far away.

After a morning in KL, we take the wonderfully cheap flight to Singapore.

We arrive early afternoon, giving us the afternoon and evening to explore one of the world's great food cities.

Singapore is clean, spectacular, futuristic and filled with hawker centres where you can eat extraordinarily well for remarkably little money. Then you order a beer. Welcome back to Brussels pricing.

We'll hunt down heritage bars, local drinking spots and somewhere appropriate for a Singapore Sling, while investigating an important question that has troubled travellers for generations: Does anybody in Singapore actually drink Singapore Slings, or is it just us?

Tonight marks one week since Brussels. It will feel like approximately February.

We've got most of another day in Singapore before heading to the airport for our late afternoon flight to Tokyo.

Tokyo at one in the morning is an interesting introduction to Japan. Neon glows. Convenience stores remain inexplicably excellent. Somewhere nearby, somebody in a suit is eating noodles.

We find the hotel and sleep as tomorrow we enter the big leagues.

Tokyo contains roughly seventeen billion places where Tipple Tours Chief Sip Officer Matt will want to stop for "just one." This may present a scheduling issue.

Our first proper Japanese day will introduce us to izakayas, standing bars, yakitori, sake, Japanese whisky and tiny drinking establishments where six customers constitutes a dangerous overcrowding situation.

Some bars are upstairs. Some are downstairs. Some are behind curtains. Some appear not to exist until somebody slides open a door.

You may spend ten minutes trying to find a bar that is three feet away from you.

Eventually we'll sit at a tiny counter, eat something grilled on a stick, drink sake poured by somebody who has been doing this for forty years and collectively decide that Tokyo might have been worth flying halfway around the world for.

Unfortunately, we're not even halfway around the world anymore. We've gone further than that.

Today we continue our rigorous investigation into Japanese drinking culture.

There will be sake. There will be Japanese whisky. There will be excellent beer. There may be drinks purchased from machines because Japan occasionally appears to have been designed during an unusually entertaining committee meeting.

Then tonight we tackle Golden Gai. Imagine somebody took hundreds of pubs, shrank each one to the dimensions of a garden shed and stacked them into a maze. That's roughly the idea.

Some bars seat five people. Some seat eight. Some have themes. Some have cover charges. Some are run by characters you will remember long after you've forgotten several actual relatives.

A normal pub crawl involves walking between pubs. Tonight may involve turning around.

We gave Tokyo a third full day because leaving after two would be ridiculous.

There are neighbourhoods to explore, food to eat, strange shops to investigate and several thousand bars we have circled on a map.

We'll keep today flexible. Maybe sake. Maybe breweries. Maybe Yokohama. Maybe somewhere none of us had heard of until breakfast.

By now the group has developed its own ecosystem. Somebody always knows where the passports are. Somebody has become responsible for finding convenience stores. Somebody hasn't known what day it is since Sri Lanka.

Tonight is our final night in Asia. Tomorrow we fly to Thursday.

Again.

Today physics finally gives up as we leave Tokyo on Thursday 29 April, fly east across the Pacific, cross the International Date Line and arrive in Los Angeles on...THURSDAY 29 APRIL.

We have travelled around the world so much that the calendar has issued us a refund. Thursday is back.

This is excellent news because anything embarrassing that happened on the first Thursday can now technically be blamed on a different Thursday.

We arrive in California with an entire bonus chunk of day ahead of us.

Welcome to Los Angeles: dive bars, craft breweries, enormous burgers, neon signs, palm trees and portions apparently designed for families of six.

Tonight we toast the International Date Line for returning several hours of our lives.

We will immediately waste them in a pub.

Somehow, against several reasonable predictions, we've made it to the final day.

Fourteen nights ago we stood at Heathrow with clean clothes and functioning circadian rhythms. Since then we've drunk Belgian beer in Brussels, Czech lager in Prague, hunted affordable beer in Dubai, investigated coconut arrack in Sri Lanka, eaten our way through Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, disappeared into tiny bars in Tokyo and experienced Thursday twice.

Today we enjoy Los Angeles before gathering for the final drink of the entire expedition. This deserves ceremony.

Glasses up. To the people we've met, the places we've seen, the drinks we couldn't pronounce and the airports we never wish to see again.

Then at 20:55, we board our final flight. London awaits.

We land at Heathrow.

This is a surprisingly emotional moment, partly because we've just travelled all the way around the planet and partly because nobody has to go through airport security tomorrow.

We left London heading east. And fourteen nights later we've arrived back from the west.

We have circumnavigated Earth in pursuit of pubs.

There were nine flights, eight drinking cities, several languages, multiple currencies, one recycled Thursday and an irresponsible number of tiny glasses.

Someone will inevitably ask: "Would you do it again?" There will be a thoughtful silence. Then someone will say:

"What about South America next time?" And that is how these problems start.