INTERVIEW
Garage Project is one of the most respected names in craft beer. Founded in 2011 in a converted petrol station in Wellington, New Zealand, they built a reputation for fearless, endlessly inventive beer that reaches drinkers from Australia to Europe to the US. This is a brewery whose whole identity is range: hazy IPAs, sours, Irish stouts, crisp lagers, barrel-aged experiments, wet hop saisons, ginger beer, non-alcoholic brews, beers made with oysters, honey or boysenberries, a catalogue that treats almost no idea as off-limits.
So you might expect their Beer Club to be just as wild. It's the opposite, and that's what makes it worth studying.
FRESH Club is built on a single style. One Hazy IPA, a brand-new one-off every month, brewed exclusively for members and never repeated. None of the range the brewery is famous for. Just this month's FRESH: a new recipe built around a different hop each time, unfiltered, unfined, sent to your door while it's at its freshest.
That's more demanding than it sounds. It would be far easier to raid the back catalogue or throw four styles in a box and call it variety. Instead they commit to a genuinely new hazy IPA every month, twelve fresh recipes a year, each one good enough that people who could drink anything Garage Project makes are happy to receive only this. For a brewery that could put anything in the box, choosing one style takes real discipline. I asked George Daroux and Jamie Hokianga what running it looks like from the inside, and why they built it this way.
I'll say up front where I stand, because it shapes how I read their answer. If you asked me how to build a Beer Club, I'd tell you to put several different beers in the box. Variety is what most members want, and it's what I'd recommend to almost anyone launching a Club. So Garage Project's single-style approach isn't the template I'd hand a brewery starting out. It's the exception, and the interesting question is why it works so well for them specifically.
Why one style rather than a mixed box?
You release plenty of different beers every month, so a varied box would clearly be possible. Was keeping it to a single rolling Hazy IPA deliberate?
"It's a good question. When we started the club, hazy IPAs were still relatively novel. There were lots of innovations happening within the style, and they were a great way to showcase different hops and new hop products. That's still the case, it's just a bit less of a stylistic novelty now. Keeping the style consistent means members know they're going to get something they love to drink, and the add-to-order function, with all the other perks, means they can tailor additional styles and new releases to their personal preference. We've toyed with mixing up the styles occasionally, and we're actively asking members what they want. In the meantime, partners like Freestyle Hops make it easy to use exciting hop varietals and keep things fresh."
Three things make it work for them, and it's worth seeing why each one is specific to Garage Project rather than a rule anyone can borrow.
First, the focus started as a strength of the moment. Hazy IPA was novel when they launched, hop innovation was exploding, and a single-style club was the perfect showcase for it. The constraint wasn't a limitation, it was the point of the product. That timing was theirs, not something a brewery launching today can recreate.
Second, consistency became a retention tool. "Members know they're going to get something they love to drink." A subscriber to FRESH knows exactly what they're getting: a great hazy IPA, different every time, but always in their wheelhouse. That only holds if your audience is deep enough in one style to happily drink it every single month, which is true for a hazy-obsessed following and untrue for most breweries. For a more general audience, a single style is a fast route to boredom, and a varied box is the safer instinct.
Third, the variety didn't disappear. It moved. The add-to-order function lets members bolt on other styles and new releases if they want them, so the core box stays one clean product to pack and ship while the full catalogue is still available to anyone who wants it. That's the genuinely portable idea here, more than the single style itself: keep the core box simple, and let an optional layer carry the variety.
That optional layer reaches members through one channel: a monthly email. Garage Project's add-to-order works because a heads-up email goes out before every dispatch, linking to a members-only collection. The Club runs on the mailing list as much as on the beer, which is exactly why I argue your email list is the biggest asset of your Beer Club. The list is what turns a simple box into a channel you can sell into every month.
What are you most proud of with your Beer Club today?
"Definitely the community it has created. We have an annual meet-up that is so joyful, it's a really cool direct line to some of our most dedicated fans."
He names the community first. Not the revenue, not the numbers. A brewery that could lead with any metric it wanted leads instead with an annual gathering of its most devoted drinkers. That's what a mature Beer Club becomes: not a sales channel, but a room full of your best customers who want to be there.
What does the Beer Club mean for the brewery now?
"Of course it's a core of relatively stable revenue, but more than that it's a two-way avenue for the more experimental side of things. When we want to understand how people feel about something we're thinking of doing, we test it with FRESH Club. When we have something special but very limited, we share it with FRESH Club. They're our main team."
For a brewery as experimental as Garage Project, the Beer Club isn't just money. It's a research instrument: a captive, engaged, trusting audience you can test ideas on and hand rare things to. That two-way channel is almost impossible to build any other way, and it compounds the longer it runs. The revenue is stable, but the feedback loop is the real prize. And the revenue itself is worth more than its size suggests, because of when and how it arrives, which is the case I make in recurring revenue is the healthiest money your brewery can make.
Did it mostly convert regulars, or bring in new customers?
"It mostly converts regular customers. However, even though it's the minority, it's surprising how many subscriptions we get as a customer's first order."
The second sentence is the surprising one. Some people's very first interaction with Garage Project is subscribing to a recurring monthly plan. They haven't bought a single can, and they're already signing up for twelve months of them. That's the pull of a strong brand meeting a simple, legible offer. When the proposition is clear enough, a Beer Club becomes a front door, not just a loyalty upgrade.
I saw the same thing at my own brewery. Some of Sparkle's Beer Club members signed up before they'd ever bought a single beer from us. Their first purchase wasn't a can, it was a subscription. It surprised me too, and it's a useful reminder that a Beer Club isn't only for the regulars you already have. For some people, it's how they meet you.
Why did you launch it, and where are you now?
"We launched coming out of COVID, after the e-commerce landscape completely changed overnight. We had to limit spaces initially so we could manage production, about 200 spots at first, and then we opened that up pretty quickly."
They capped it on purpose. Two hundred spots, not because demand was low, but to keep production under control. Starting deliberately small isn't a weakness. It's how you make sure you can actually deliver what you promised before you scale it.
What was the trickiest part of getting it live?
"Probably just getting the user experience right on our very custom webstore front. There are lots of great subscription management tools out there, so that wasn't really an issue."
What tools do you run it on?
"We use Recharge and Shopify."
This one matters to me. Garage Project, a brewery of this stature, runs FRESH Club on exactly the stack I build Beer Clubs on: Shopify and Recharge. And look at what George said the hard part was, and what it wasn't. The subscription tooling "wasn't really an issue." The tricky part was the storefront experience wrapped around it. That's the entire reason Riwaka exists: the plumbing is a solved problem, and the value is in building a front end that feels like the brewery and converts. Garage Project had the team to do that themselves. Most breweries don't.
What turned out to be more of a pain than expected?
"I honestly can't think of anything too painful. It's a format that just makes sense for us."
Set that answer next to a brewery like Frontaal, whose Beer Club is a collab-heavy, sourcing-intensive, six-people-packing-for-a-day operation. Garage Project can't think of anything painful. The difference isn't that one brewery is better run than the other. It's that they designed for different amounts of work, and got different things back. FRESH Club is one style, brewed on your own site, on your own schedule, with a new recipe each month but no sourcing or importing. That's about the lowest-effort box a brewery can ship. Frontaal's collab-driven box asks far more, and rewards members with discovery a single-style box can't. Neither is the right answer. They're different bets, and the effort follows the bet.
In a typical month, how much time does it take to run?
"The biggest piece of work is actually dispatching the orders, because it all happens in two days. But we have a good system for that now."
What needs the most ongoing attention?
"The main thing is keeping front of mind all the opportunities to include FRESH Club, engage them, make the most of this group, and make it as cool as possible for them beyond the beers in the box."
Once the logistics are smooth, the ongoing work stops being operational and becomes relational. The job is remembering to bring the Club into everything: the early access, the perks, the meet-up, the members-only drops. The beer is the easy part. Keeping the membership feeling special is the work that never quite finishes, and it's the work that keeps people subscribed.
If you were starting from scratch today, what would you do differently?
"Honestly, probably nothing. We wouldn't want to overcomplicate it."
What would you say to a brewer on the fence about launching?
"Design it so that it's easy to maintain and be consistent with."
That single line is the whole philosophy of FRESH Club, and it runs against how most breweries instinctively approach a Beer Club. The temptation is always to make it elaborate, a rotating showcase of everything you can do. Garage Project, more capable of elaborate than almost anyone, chose easy to maintain and consistent instead. They built something they could sustain forever, and then they sustained it.
Put Garage Project next to a brewery like Frontaal and you get two almost opposite Beer Clubs. Frontaal's is intricate, collab-rich, and demanding. Garage Project's is a single style, a new hazy IPA shipped every month, with, in their own words, nothing painful about it. Both work. That contrast is the most useful thing a brewer on the fence can understand.
Because it means the question was never "are Beer Clubs a lot of work?" The honest answer is: exactly as much as you design them to be. Garage Project kept the core box radically simple and pushed the variety into an optional add-to-order layer on top, and from that they got a stable revenue base, a research channel for their most experimental ideas, and a joyful annual gathering of their most loyal fans, from a format that, by their own account, never became a burden.
Their single-style box isn't the part to copy. That one is theirs: it rests on a hazy-obsessed following and a brand strong enough to carry the same style month after month, and for most breweries a varied box is still the better instinct. What does transfer is the discipline underneath it. Keep the core of your Club simple enough to run without resentment. Let an optional layer carry the variety, driven by a monthly email, so the box stays easy to pack while members can still reach for everything else you make. Start with a cap you can actually fulfil. Run it on tooling that already exists, Shopify and Recharge, and spend your energy on the experience, not the plumbing. Then bring the Club into everything you do, and let the relationship compound.
The lesson isn't "make your Club a single beer." It's that a Club works when it's designed around what you can sustain, and Garage Project happens to be the sharpest example of a brewery that knew exactly what that was for them.
A huge thank you to George and Jamie at Garage Project for their time and their candour. It's a generous thing, sharing how the machine actually runs. If you're ever in Wellington, their taprooms are worth the trip. You can find FRESH Club at garageproject.co.nz.
Read next: How Frontaal Brewing Co. runs one of the biggest Beer Clubs in Europe.
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