Nepal: The Abominable Booze Tour

Welcome to Kathmandu, a city where the traffic operates on a sophisticated system of horns, optimism and divine intervention. We'll collect you from the airport, introduce you to your fellow adventurers and head to our hotel in Thamel, where the streets are packed with restaurants, bars, trekking shops and people who've just returned from climbing mountains and desperately want everyone to know about it.

Our first evening is a gentle introduction to Nepalese beer, which is Tipple Tours terminology for ordering several different bottles and pretending it's a structured educational exercise. We'll sample local favourites such as Gorkha and Everest, investigate the neighbourhood's better drinking establishments and sit down to a traditional Nepalese welcome feast. Expect momos, curries, suspiciously generous portions and a group of strangers who'll probably be discussing bowel movements by breakfast.

Tonight's achievement: Arrive in Nepal, locate a bar and avoid accidentally signing up for a 21-day trek.

We're starting with some culture, partly because Kathmandu has an extraordinary amount of it and partly because visiting a brewery at nine in the morning might attract the wrong sort of attention. Our first stop is Swayambhunath, the famous Monkey Temple, where hundreds of monkeys spend their days stealing food, terrorising tourists and generally behaving like badly supervised stag parties.

After exploring Kathmandu's ancient streets, markets and temples, we'll turn our attention to its growing craft beer scene. We'll visit a selection of independent beer bars and brewpubs, comparing Nepalese interpretations of familiar styles and tracking down anything particularly unusual. We'll also arrange a brewer-led tasting as listening to somebody explain fermentation is considerably more entertaining when you're drinking the evidence.

Dinner brings the inaugural Great Kathmandu Momo & Beer Challenge, an entirely unofficial competition involving steamed dumplings, fried dumplings, chilli dumplings and the growing realisation that Nepal may have invented the perfect drinking snack. There are no winners, only increasingly tight waistbands.

Tonight's achievement: Learn something about Buddhism, discover three new beers and successfully retain possession of your sunglasses around monkeys.

Today we're heading west towards Kurintar for one of the trip's main attractions: Barahsinghe Brewery, a proper working brewery in the Himalayan foothills. This is where Nepal's modern beer ambitions meet the slightly inconvenient geographical reality that nearly everything is either uphill, downhill or on the other side of a mountain.

We'll aim to arrange a behind-the-scenes brewery visit to discover how Nepalese beer is produced, meet the people responsible for keeping the nation refreshed and taste the finished products. Expect brewing equipment, fermentation tanks, enthusiastic explanations of malt and hops and at least one guest asking whether they can buy a keg for their hotel room.

Afterwards, we'll continue towards Pokhara, stopping for lunch and enjoying some spectacular scenery. The journey is an adventure in itself, featuring dramatic valleys, rushing rivers and occasional stretches of road where everybody suddenly becomes very interested in the driver's qualifications.

We finish beside Phewa Lake, where the mountains provide a magnificent backdrop to our evening drinks. There's something deeply satisfying about enjoying a cold beer beneath peaks that have defeated professional mountaineers.

Tonight's achievement: Visit a brewery in the Himalayas without having to carry the beer up the Himalayas.

Pokhara is one of those places that makes you wonder why you've spent so much of your life staring at the M25. Surrounded by spectacular Himalayan scenery and overlooking a beautiful lake, it's Nepal's adventure capital, although our definition of adventure involves significantly fewer ropes, helmets and emergency helicopters.

We'll take a boat across Phewa Lake, explore the lakeside neighbourhoods and visit a scenic viewpoint. Those wanting extra excitement can arrange optional paragliding, weather permitting. Those with a more sensible attitude towards gravity can enjoy a coffee and watch people willingly throw themselves off mountains.

The afternoon is devoted to investigating Pokhara's beer bars and local drinking establishments. We'll seek out Nepalese craft beers, sample regional snacks and learn why a cold lager tastes particularly magnificent after several hours of admiring mountains. Tonight we'll enjoy a traditional Nepalese dinner, followed by a relaxed lakeside bar crawl involving absolutely no compulsory singing, unless somebody starts it.

Tonight's achievement: Successfully spend an entire day in Nepal's adventure capital without needing travel insurance for an extreme sport.

Today we leave the familiar comforts of lager and IPA behind and enter the gloriously unpredictable world of traditional Nepalese alcoholic beverages. For centuries, communities across Nepal have been fermenting rice, millet and other grains into drinks that rarely come with tasting notes, marketing departments or helpful information about what percentage alcohol they contain.

We'll arrange a hosted introduction to traditional brewing, ideally with a family or community producer who can demonstrate how drinks such as chhyang are made. We'll also explore raksi, a traditional distilled spirit that can be wonderfully aromatic and occasionally rather enthusiastic about announcing its presence.

If we can arrange authentic tongba, we'll try that too. This eastern Himalayan speciality involves fermented millet served in a tall vessel, topped up with hot water and consumed through a straw. It's effectively an alcoholic hot-water bottle for your insides, with the added entertainment of discovering that the same millet can keep producing drinks.

We'll finish with a Nepalese cooking experience, preparing traditional dishes and discovering whether it's possible to make dumplings while maintaining a completely professional attitude towards the accompanying beverages.

Tonight's achievement: Drink something warm, cloudy and fermented through a straw, then confidently describe it as a cultural experience rather than a dare.

We're leaving Pokhara and heading towards Bandipur, a beautiful hilltop town where traditional Newari houses line narrow streets and the surrounding mountains provide scenery that would normally require a very expensive television screensaver.

After exploring the historic centre, we'll enjoy a leisurely lunch before investigating the Newari community's impressive contribution to Nepalese food and drinking culture. One particularly interesting discovery is aila, a traditional grain spirit that can be surprisingly powerful despite occasionally arriving in a vessel approximately the size of a thimble.

We'll aim to arrange a hosted Newari feast, complete with regional dishes, local drinks and explanations of the traditions behind them. This is the sort of meal where food keeps appearing long after you've announced that you're completely full, and refusing another helping feels like an international diplomatic incident.

Tonight we stay in Bandipur, enjoying its peaceful atmosphere, mountain views and the rare opportunity to hear ourselves think. At least until somebody suggests one last drink.

Tonight's achievement: Discover that Nepalese hospitality is measured in the number of times somebody ignores your claim that you couldn't possibly eat another thing.

We're returning to the Kathmandu Valley but not before stopping in Bhaktapur, one of Nepal's most extraordinary historic cities. This UNESCO World Heritage destination is packed with medieval squares, magnificent temples, traditional pottery workshops and buildings that have survived centuries without anybody deciding to turn them into luxury apartments.

We'll explore the old city with a local guide, discover its fascinating history and sample juju dhau, the famous thick yoghurt known as the King of Curd. This may be the only Tipple Tours holiday where yoghurt receives almost as much attention as beer, although we promise not to start a yoghurt-tasting division of the company. We'll also investigate traditional Newari food and drinking customs before heading back to Kathmandu.

Tonight offers another opportunity to visit independent beer bars and revisit any particularly impressive discoveries from earlier in the trip. By now, everybody should be sufficiently knowledgeable about Nepalese beer to become completely unbearable at their local pub back home.

Tonight's achievement: Visit a UNESCO World Heritage Site, eat royal yoghurt and continue pretending this is all part of an extremely serious research expedition.

It's our final full day, and we're celebrating with an event of such enormous international importance that absolutely nobody outside our group will have heard of it: The First Annual Tipple Tours Himalayan Beer Olympics.

After a relaxed morning for shopping, sightseeing or purchasing yet another yak-related souvenir, we'll assemble for an afternoon of entirely unnecessary competitive drinking knowledge. Events include blind beer identification, matching Nepalese snacks to different brews, guessing the ingredients in traditional fermented drinks and the prestigious Momo Mastermind Challenge.

There'll be medals, ridiculous awards and a trophy of such limited financial value that customs officials will wave it through without a second glance. The winner will receive the coveted title of Supreme Himalayan Beer Yak, an honour that will look spectacularly unimpressive on LinkedIn.

Tonight we gather for our farewell feast, raising a glass to nine days of extraordinary landscapes, fascinating drinking traditions, brilliant food and the sort of friendships that normally require several years and a shared mortgage to develop.

Tonight's achievement: Win absolutely nothing of value while becoming disproportionately proud of your knowledge of fermented millet.

After breakfast, we'll arrange airport transfers and say goodbye to Nepal, a country that has somehow managed to combine magnificent mountains, extraordinary hospitality, ancient traditions and an impressive enthusiasm for fermenting things.

You'll return home with new friends, spectacular photographs, several favourite Nepalese beers and a completely unnecessary amount of knowledge about traditional grain-based alcohol. You may also find yourself explaining to confused relatives why drinking warm millet through a straw was one of the highlights of your holiday.

You've explored ancient cities, visited a Himalayan brewery, enjoyed mountain scenery, discovered unusual drinks and eaten enough dumplings to qualify for honorary Nepalese citizenship. You haven't climbed Everest but you've certainly reached some impressive heights in the pursuit of a decent pint.

Nepal conquered. Everest untouched. Thirst thoroughly investigated. See you next time on a Tipple Tour!