Nearly 1,000 people have signed up to receive Frontaal's beer every two months, and kept paying, for years. They've done it in the Netherlands, 17 million people, on a home market a fraction the size of the US, where big subscriber numbers come easier. That's a remarkable thing to build, and worth understanding how.
Frontaal Brewing Company runs one of the most established Beer Clubs in European craft: nearly 1,000 members, nine beers a box, every two months. I asked the team what running it actually looks like from the inside.
Based in Breda, in the south of the Netherlands, they've been at it for years, since around the COVID period, shipping boxes stuffed with collabs from across Europe and Beer Club exclusives. Almost all of those members are Dutch. That detail is easy to skim past, but sit with it for a second: they built a thousand-strong recurring membership on essentially one small national market, mostly people who already knew the brewery. No huge addressable population to fall back on. Just a country the size of a mid-sized US state, and a Beer Club that reached nearly everyone in it who cares about good beer. The Club now moves a serious share of everything the brewery makes.
What are you most proud of with your Beer Club today?
"Our very involved crowd. They support everything we do, they like our beers, and some of them have been part of the Beer Club for over three years. The number of people joining and leaving is about even, so we're very stable in terms of members, which shows the huge support we have."
That stability is the part worth pausing on. A Club that holds steady at nearly 1,000 members, with joins and cancellations roughly cancelling out, is a Club that has found its natural size in its market. That's not a failure to grow. It's a base you can plan a business around.
What does the Beer Club mean for the brewery now?
"Beyond everything already mentioned, we know that every special is going out in a predictable way, which is a huge part of the sales plan for each release. Including webshop sales, about 30% of the hectoliters leaving our brewery go through e-commerce, Beer Club and webshop together."
Thirty percent of volume through direct e-commerce is a striking number for a craft brewery. Most breweries are overwhelmingly dependent on trade. A third of production leaving through channels you own and control is a fundamentally healthier shape of business.
It's worth doing the arithmetic a founder actually cares about. Frontaal didn't share revenue figures, so this is only an estimate from their public pricing, but the shape is clear. Their box runs somewhere around €37 to €49 depending on commitment, shipped six times a year. Take a conservative 850 members at €40 a box: that's roughly €34,000 per drop, six times a year, on the order of €200,000 a year in recurring, direct, prepaid revenue. Even if the real number is lower, it's a line on the P&L that arrives on a schedule, from customers who chose the brewery on purpose, with no distributor taking a cut. That's revenue, not margin, the beer, the shipping, and those far-flung collabs all cost money, as you'll see below. But it's revenue of the healthiest kind: recurring, prepaid, and direct. It's the exact shape of income I've argued every brewery should be building toward, for reasons I lay out in recurring revenue is the healthiest money your brewery can make. Frontaal is what that argument looks like once it's running at scale. That is the prize, and it's why the operational headaches below are worth pushing through.
Did it mostly convert regulars, or bring in new customers?
"Both, I'd say 50-50. A lot of regulars, but also a lot of people who can't be regulars simply because they live too far from our taproom in Breda. About 95% goes to the Dutch market, and we're working on that."
This is one of the quiet superpowers of a Beer Club. Half of Frontaal's members are people who love the brewery but live too far away to ever be taproom regulars. Without the Club, that entire group is unreachable. With it, distance stops being a barrier to being a regular.
If you run a brewery and you're reading this, that's the sentence to underline. Somewhere out there is a version of Frontaal's crowd for you: the people who already like your beer and would happily pay to receive it every month, if only you gave them the way to. Frontaal didn't invent that demand. They built the channel for it. The demand was already sitting in their audience, the same way it's probably sitting in yours.
Why did you launch it, and where are you now?
"We launched around COVID. We lost some data along the way, so I'm not sure exactly how many joined at the first launch, but we're now steady between 750 and 1,000 members."
What was the trickiest part of getting it live?
"The unpredictability. Both the needs of the market, and getting all the systems aligned: shipping, pickup, which we also offer, the deposit system, age checks."
Worth noting how little of that difficulty is about beer. Shipping, pickup, deposit handling, age verification. The hard part of launching a Beer Club is rarely the product. It's the operational plumbing around it.
What tools do you run it on?
"We use Chargebee, which honestly isn't the best platform, but it works. We had to move to it when our old platform shut down. My dream is to have everything under one roof, within Shopify, but I haven't found the perfect plugin for it."
I hear this constantly from breweries running Clubs at scale, and it's exactly the gap I built Riwaka to close, a Beer Club that lives natively in Shopify instead of a separate subscription platform bolted on the side. Frontaal's setup works, but "it works" and "it's built on the tool we already run our whole store on" are different levels of comfort. The platform question is one of the most common regrets I hear from breweries who launched early on whatever was available.
What turned out to be more of a pain than expected?
"The system, as mentioned. And we started with two options, six beers or ten beers per box. Logistically that's pretty challenging: purchasing, pricing, handling. We brought it back to eight, and now we do nine, because it makes more sense for us packaging-wise and for our release calendar."
This is a real-world confirmation of something I've written about separately: starting with multiple box sizes creates operational complexity that a young Club rarely benefits from. Frontaal ran two box sizes, found the logistics painful, and consolidated to a single size tuned to how they actually package and release. They didn't land on one box because a blog told them to. They landed on it because two boxes hurt. It's the same lesson I learned the hard way at my own brewery, which I've written up in full in why starting with one tier is the best thing you could do for your Beer Club, linked at the end of this piece.
It's worth being precise here, because their page today shows three options and that can look like a contradiction. Those three are not box sizes. They're commitment lengths for the exact same box: Flex at €49 a box with no commitment, six months at €39, twelve months at €37, all of them the same nine beers every two months. The longer you commit, the cheaper the box. That's a pricing structure, not a product-complexity problem. The thing they simplified was the box itself, one size, one packing operation, and then they let customers choose how long they want to lock in. Simplify the product, and you can afford to offer flexibility on the terms.
In a typical month, how much time does it take to run?
"We ship bimonthly. In shipping months it's one full day of packing with about six people. Purchasing takes a lot of time too, because we add collabs to every box. Say we do a collab somewhere in France: we travel there, brew the collab, import that beer plus an extra one from the brewery we collabed with. We usually have two collabs in every bimonthly box, so a collab every month. Hard to give exact hours, but a lot of effort goes into every box."
I want to be honest about this answer, because it cuts against the "set it and forget it" fantasy that recurring revenue sometimes gets sold as. Frontaal's box is not a low-effort operation. It's a curated, collab-heavy product that takes real sourcing work and a six-person packing day. That effort is a choice: they've built a premium, discovery-driven box, and that kind of box demands sourcing. A simpler box of your own core releases would take a fraction of the work. The lesson isn't "Beer Clubs are hard." It's "the box you design determines the workload you sign up for."
What needs the most ongoing attention?
"Being very precise on the contents of the box, making the collabs, mostly abroad, arranging packaging material, getting a packing team together."
If you were starting from scratch today, what would you do differently?
"A different system. And brew a lot of unique specials just for the Beer Club. That said, it's hard to have this many people on board without COVID having happened, and we have around 7,000 investors in our brewery who are also very engaged. I'm pretty happy with the Beer Club we have today."
Credit to them for the honesty here. It would have been easy to take full credit for nearly a thousand members. Instead they name the tailwinds plainly: the COVID timing, and a base of 7,000 invested, engaged owner-fans who were always going to show up. I'll come back to what that means for a brewery starting today, because the answer is more encouraging than it first sounds.
What would you say to a brewer on the fence about launching?
"Go for it, and ask questions to fellow breweries who already have a Beer Club. Everyone is very happy to help each other."
Anything else?
"Beyond all the financial benefits, it's an amazing way to get all your beers into the market and get people talking. In the Dutch market, Untappd is huge. Our Beer Club and brewpub helped us get to the top of the beer scene there, because we're the most talked-about. Beyond hard cash, it's an organic marketing tool in a really, really good way."
This last point is the one I'd underline for any brewery weighing a Club purely as a revenue line. Frontaal's members don't just pay. They check in on Untappd, they post, they talk. A Beer Club puts your newest and rarest beer into the hands of the exact people most likely to tell the world about it, every single month. The recurring revenue is the floor. The word of mouth is the part that compounds.
Strip the story down and three things stand out, and none of them require luck to copy.
A mature Beer Club finds a stable size and holds it, and that stability is the asset, not a limit. The workload is a function of how elaborate the box is, not something inherent to Beer Clubs, so the box can be designed around the effort a brewery can actually sustain. And the platform a Club launches on will either be a quiet source of comfort or a recurring headache for years, which makes it worth getting right early.
It's only fair to name the parts that don't transfer, because Frontaal named them first. The COVID timing and the 7,000 invested, engaged owner-fans gave them a running start most breweries won't have. The scale came partly from circumstance.
But strip that away and look at what remains, because it's the part that matters for anyone weighing a Club of their own. A brewery in a small country, selling to essentially one national market, convinced nearly a thousand people to pay for their beer on standing order, and has kept them for years. They did it by making a decision most breweries never make: to build a direct, recurring channel to the people who already loved them, instead of leaving that demand on the table. The circumstances gave them speed. The decision is what anyone can copy. If Frontaal proves anything, it's that the ceiling for a Beer Club is far higher than most brewers dare to imagine, even from a standing start on home soil.
A big thank you to Guus van Nijnatten and the whole Frontaal team for their time, their openness, and their honesty about both the wins and the hard parts. This is exactly the kind of generosity Guus talked about, brewers helping brewers, and it's what makes this scene worth being part of. If you're anywhere near Breda, go say hello and grab a beer at the brewpub. You can find their Beer Club at frontaalbrewingcompany.com.
Read next: Recurring revenue is the healthiest money your brewery can make.
Read next: Why starting with one tier is the best thing you could do.
