Welcome to your guide to factory tours!

With offices only two miles from Fenway Park, Watch It Made lives amid baseball fever every summer. So it was only natural for us to visit the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory in Kentucky when researching our book on factory tours. With the pennant races in full throttle and the school vacations in the doldrums, August seems an especially good time to see how the famous Louisville Slugger baseball bats are made.

Created by Bud Hillerich in 1884, the Louisville Slugger has been swung by such baseball heroes as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio. In 1996, the Hillerich & Bradsby Company opened the Louisville Slugger Museum in Louisville, KY. On display are actual bats swung by some of the most famous hitters in the baseball's history. Among the many attractions, you can take the field in a replica of Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles. Choose a famous pitcher to throw the ball in your direction at 90 miles per hour, or step into a batting cage and take a few swings.

Visitors can also take a guided factory tour. Amid the ubiquitous smell of wood, H&B turns billets of maple and northern white ash into Louisville Slugger bats. Most are made on automatic lathes. It takes about 40 seconds to make a bat on the tracer lathes. Workers use a metal pattern of the exact bat shape and guide the machine to trace this pattern—the process is similar to copying a key at a hardware store. All of the bats used in Major League Baseball are made on a special CNC lathe, the only one of its kind in the world.

The famous oval trademark is seared into the wood, along with the bat's model number. Sometimes a player's autograph is still emblazoned on the "flat of the grain." Bats can also be foil-branded with either gold or silver. Behind the branders, large cabinets hold more than 8,500 professional players' autograph brands.

Planning a "staycation" instead of a summer road-trip this year? Bear in mind that your baseball team's home stadium may offer a guided tour, giving you some behind-the-scenes baseball action close to home. In addition, there may be any number of interesting factory tours right in your area—perfect for day-trips. Check our book Watch It Made to find out.

Cold beer in bottles is a staple on the hot days and evenings of American summer barbecues. You can see where the beer in your bottle came from in any of the brewery tours detailed among the factory tours we write about in Watch It Made.

One of these tours is at Yuengling in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, where the company started making beer in 1829. In fact, Yuengling, whose classic bottled lager has acquired kitschy retro-appeal, operates the oldest brewery in the U.S. Built in 1831, the historic brick building still stands near downtown Pottsville in the heart of the Pennsylvania coal region.

Visitors gather in the bar area for a tour, which starts with an account of the brewery's history and the beer-making process. The next step takes you into the brewing plant itself alongside the workers. (The tour involves climbing 170 stairs, so be prepared for a workout.)

The tour focuses on the four giant metal tanks, called kettles, in which the brewers create all the Yuengling beers. The cereal cooker combines water, corn, and malt. In the vat called the mash tun, the brewers add more malt. The lauter separates the grain from the liquid, which by now is known as wort, the base of all beer. Hops join the wort in the brew kettle. Throughout, the aroma of cooking grain fills the nostrils.

The brew cools and then moves to the fermentation stage. Yeast, the universal catalyst of beer making, enters the process. Over time, it eats sugars in the mixture to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. After the brewers filter the liquor to give it a crisp and clear appearance, it goes to the bottling line. You go with it to watch the machinery fill the bottles with bright fresh lager beer.

Before the tour ends with a well-earned free tasting, you visit the historic cave underneath the building. Refrigeration, whether natural or mechanical, is essential for making lager. Lined with stone walls that workers built by hand in 1831, the perpetually cool cellar of the Yuengling brewery served the purposes of fermenting and aging Yuengling beer before modern refrigeration.

If you think that visiting a cool beer cellar sounds a nice way to get out of the heat, see Watch It Made for other factory tours that offer enticing summer escapes.

While squeezing toothpaste back into the tube remains a metaphor for the impossible, you can at least see how it gets in there to begin with by taking the factory tour at Tom's of Maine (www.tomsofmaine.com), available in summer from mid-June.

In 1970, Kate and Tom Chappell moved to Maine in search of a simpler life. Their strategy? Creating a company committed to developing all-natural personal-hygiene products, such as toothpaste, mouthwash, soap, and deodorant. While we don't know whether they found a simpler life, they have created a successful company. In fact, their toothpaste—made without artificial preservatives, sweeteners, or coloring—is a top brand in the U.S. (It has even found a market among the famously troublesome teeth of the British.)

The company also strives to be socially and environmentally compassionate. Almost all of its products are made by a manufacturing facility in Sanford, Maine, that is designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible.

As you walk upstairs to the second floor, you'll know what products the toothpaste and liquid lines are packaging. If you smell cinnamon, they're packaging that flavor of toothpaste or mouthwash. An intense coriander smell usually means deodorant. You will see the machine that pumps the toothpaste into recyclable tubes and clamps the backs closed.

In general, the company tries to minimize packaging while maximizing the portion of recyclable material used in packaging. For example, in mouthwash containers the outer paper carton has been replaced with a thin leaflet that folds into the back of the recyclable plastic container.

What is most interesting about this tour isn't so much the production process but the sense that the workers enjoy their jobs and take quality control seriously. In an effort to stave off monotony, every hour most workers on the packaging line switch positions. A worker who has been putting the tubes into the filler machine moves on to box toothpaste. The smiles you see aren't just to show off good teeth—Tom's of Maine seems to be a nice place to work.

Indeed, factory tours can provide fascinating insights on how others work and live. To read about more tours you can take, see our book Watch It Made in the U.S.A.

The McIlhenny Company in Louisiana is the real Tabasco: it makes the world-famous brand of hot-pepper sauce. Now an international operation, the company grows its basic ingredient, the Capsicum frutescens pepper, in several countries to ensure a good harvest, sells its signature product in more than 160 countries and territories around the world, and prints its labels in 21 languages. Still, there is just one Tabasco factory, located west of New Orleans on Avery Island, Louisiana.

You'll know you're there as soon as you open your car door and catch a whiff of the piquant local aroma. Tours start with a film explaining that during the 19th century the company's founder created his Tabasco sauce (which takes its name from a river and state of Mexico) by mashing C. frutescens peppers with Avery Island salt, aging the mash in wooden barrels, adding vinegar, and then straining the mixture.

Along a corridor in the modern factory, you can see four lines of Tabasco sauce being bottled behind a long glass wall. The smell here is strong—but not nearly as strong as it must be inside the packaging room. Some lines produce more than 300 bottles of Tabasco sauce a minute, helping the factory produce at least 600,000 bottles a day.

After the bottles are spun around in the carousel and injected with the hot red-pepper sauce, they journey naked down the assembly line. Machines clothe the bottles with the familiar bright red octagonal caps, green foil neckbands, and diamond-shaped labels. The dressed bottles are then mechanically packed in boxes, ready to travel.

Burning with curiosity? See our book Watch It Made in the U.S.A. for more about this and other factory tours.