Copenhagen, Denmark City Guide
In June 2017, my husband and I embarked on a three-week long backpacking trip of western Europe. In my first post of this series, I go through all the details about preparing for this trip from itinerary, budget, packing, riding the train, lodging, and other common questions I’m asked. Now, I’ll take you through a detailed “City Guide” of every city we visited, and my top recommendations of where to eat and drink, where to stay, and what to see. This is a short guide to the 24-hours we spent in Copenhagen, Denmark, drinking craft beer with our hostel-mate friends!
To begin our trip, we flew into Stockholm, Sweden where we spent a few days visiting a friend and enjoying pickled herring and afternoon fika. Then we caught a train from Stockholm, to Malmö, to Copenhagen Denmark. We spent half a day and one night in Copenhagen on our way to Hamburg, Germany.
Before I dive into the details about what we saw and did in Copenhagen, a little background on the travel style Curtis and I enjoy. Our favorite way to travel is to get immersed in local culture. We like to eat unique foods and people-watch. On the flip side, we don’t like to do much in the way of touring — I can’t stand waiting in line or crowded attractions. We also like to be outdoors, so one of our favorite things to do is just stroll along the city and see the sights. Our travel style is low-key, affordable, and cultural. So you’ll find a lot of these types of travel recommendations in our city guides. If that’s the type of travel you like, too, read on!
Where to Stay
We highly recommend the Copenhagen Downtown Hostel — which was the most fun hostel experience we had on our whole trip. Like I mentioned, we were only in Copenhagen for a short amount of time, and while we were there it was cold (really windy!) and a little rainy, so we didn’t feel up to our usual favorite outdoor activities of strolling the Old Town and walking alongside the water– even though Copenhagen has some beautiful canal waterfronts we would have loved to explore more.
But we were so glad we chose to stay at the Copenhagen Downtown Hostel because we found enough entertainment and cool culture just inside the hostel walls itself. It made up for the fact that we didn’t get to do a lot of exploring. This hostel had an amazing bar, with games, food, and local beer! We met other travelers from Australia, Detroit, Argentina, and Ireland, and we all sat together in the bar telling stories about our backpacking adventures over drinks. To Curtis and I, this kind of memorable night is where the joy of travelling comes from.
Where to Drink Beer in Copenhagen, Denmark
If you do one thing when you’re in Copenhagen, please, please make it Mikkeller Bar. Copenhagen has a fantastic craft beer scene, and this is bar is well-known as the best. There are two Mikkeller locations — we visited the smaller, original location in Vesterbro. This bar is the epitome of “Scandi” cool, and they have about 40 spectacular craft beers on tap.
And high on my list for next time we visit Copenhagen is Broaden and Build — a craft brewery and restaurant with incredible sustainability initiatives. Read all about it Caña, an artisan craft beer and culture magazine.
What to Do
Like I mentioned, the weather wasn’t great when we were in Copenhagen, so we spent most of our time huddled indoors enjoying craft beer. No regrets! The one thing we wanted to do, but the weather didn’t permit, was rent bikes to ride along the canals. From what we could tell, Copenhagen was one of the most bicycle-friendly cities on our western Europe trip — it seems like everyone commutes on bike in Copenhagen! If you’re there on a nicer day, considering giving that a go.
I hope you enjoyed this guide to great hostels and craft beer in Copenhagen, Denmark. For more general tips about backpacking western Europe, head back over to the travel section of my blog. For more City Guides, including what we did in Sweden, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Austria — press on! -Emily
