Discover Glendale: Brewery, Nature, and History

Glendale offers a range of ways to plan your trip. If you’re looking for a hotel in Glendale, you can focus on Sprecher Brewery, nature, or history. Highlights include a family-friendly brewery tour, access to the Oak Leaf Trail, a waterfall on the Milwaukee River, and several connections to the area’s history. You can decide in advance whether a brewery visit, trail access, fishing, or local history is most important for your stay.

Brewery and seasonal beer garden

At Sprecher Brewery, the tour and tasting are two separate experiences. The tours are family-friendly and suitable for guests of all ages. The daily “Tasting Experience” includes unlimited soda and four tasting pours of Sprecher beer or hard soda. The distinction is useful when planning: the all-ages statement applies to the tours, while the Tasting is a daily sampling format featuring named beverages and a set number of pours.

Another Sprecher-related venue is the family-friendly Sprecher Brewing Outdoor Oasis, a beer garden in Richard E. Maslowski Community Park. It serves Sprecher beverages and food. As a seasonal offering, the beer garden is different from the daily Tasting: for the 2026 season, opening day is Wednesday, June 10. Check the latest seasonal operating information before planning a visit.

Trail and waterfall

The Oak Leaf Trail is accessible in Glendale at Richard E. Maslowski Park. A waterfall on the Milwaukee River in Glendale draws anglers from across the Midwest. You can fish there for spawning salmon and other migratory fish. These are two distinct nature-related interests: for the trail, the specific point of reference is access at the park; for the waterfall, it’s fishing.

Historic connections in Glendale

Potawatomi villages once stood in what is now Glendale. The burial mounds in Kletzsch Park are evidence of the civilization that once flourished there. This historical connection differs from the later ties to settlers and municipal institutions: it refers to the history of the Potawatomi in the area of present-day Glendale.

Glendale has preserved the first meeting hall of the Town of Milwaukee; the building is a landmark dating to 1872. Milwaukee Union Cemetery has also been preserved. The small cemetery contains about 100 graves, many of them unmarked, and is associated with early settlers. The hall and cemetery offer different historical connections: one is a specific building with a date, while the other is a burial ground with an approximate number of graves and a connection to early settlers.

Taken together, these historical themes range from the earlier Potawatomi villages to a municipal building dating to 1872 and the history of early settlers. If you choose Glendale for a cultural focus, you can distinguish these connections rather than treating them as a single, undifferentiated attraction.

Discover more destinations: Greenfield, South Milwaukee, Cudahy, Wauwatosa, Milwaukee, Oak Creek, Brown Deer, Shorewood

Go to the main travel overview: Milwaukee.