Some of the pubs are pretty far apart, but the walk is an excellent way to stay sober(er), and Edinburgh is a wonderful city to walk in. This works like any pub crawl: you go to the first pub and tell the bartender that you want to do the Downtown Edinburgh Ale Trail. We stumbled upon this completely by accident, I don’t remember if there are signs or if the bartender brought it up, but they won’t look at you like you’re crazy when you ask. When you tell the bartender, he or she will give you a map and a stamp for the pint you purchase.

At each pub on the map, you go in, order a pint or half-pint, and collect another stamp. You can go to the pubs in any order you want, but you have to finish up at Bar Oz. Once you order your pint there, they’ll take your map and give you a T-shirt. The pubs are Ye Olde Golf Tavern, Bennets, Bar Oz, Livingroom, Finnigan’s Wake, Royal Mile Tavern, Biddy Mulligan’s, Maggie Dickson’s, Beehive Inn, and The Old Fire Station.

This is so much fun and an excellent way to mingle with the locals. If you’re not a big drinker, stick to half-pints. We actually finished the crawl over the course of 2days because day one was interrupted by a rugby team from Coventry, England, that we met at the Beehive Inn. They took us to a club one the other side of the street called Espionage.

Side note: Even if you’re not a big clubber (and I’m not), Espionage is worth checking out. The whole place has a spy/James Bond theme. It has three levels: one is a low-key pub level, and another is a frenetic dance club down in the basement. I don’t know what the third is because we only went to two of them. The pub is very chill and dimly lit, with a lot of dark wood. The club was packed tight with bodies and was designed to look like a cave. It was cool but so full and the ceiling is quite low, so I felt uncomfortable and claustrophobic. It was a Friday night over Easter break weekend, so that may be part of the reason it was so packed. Even though it was really full, we only had to wait to get in about 20 minutes.