I did the same courses as Hendrixcat, found them both to be reasonably good, though completely focused on the English Real Ale, no other beer style got a look in, but I suppose that's to be expected considering their audience. There wasn't a great deal of technical detail, but they did spend a good bit of time going into the detail of the quality control aspects, which wasn't surprising considering where they're coming from as a testing lab. We seen four breweries on day three from a 2.5 barrel mom and pop set-up to a huge 20 barrel brewery in an industrial warehouse. Unfortunately these tours suffered from serious scheduling problems as we spent an age in the tiny place and we were rushed through the last two farmhouse breweries that were considerably more interesting especially the last one which boasted a very sharp looking visitors centre.
The bottling course was decent to, though some of it was a rehash of the previous days. I think we got a fairly good insight into why there's not too many Irish bottled beers on the market at the moment. There was a good bit of science on the bottling course, looking down microscopes and tasting spiked beer and the reasons behind it.
The people running the course were personalable and hung around in the pub afterwards sharing brewing anecdotes and opinions, which was interesting enough.
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