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The right price and the right number of beers, from a brewer who got it wrong, fixed it, and doubled his Club in a month.
The first thing most breweries do when they design a Beer Club is look at what other Clubs charge. Cloudwater is at one number, Garage Project is at another, the brewery two towns over at a third. Pick something in the middle, the logic goes, and you're safe.
You're not. You're anchored to someone else's customers.
A Beer Club in the UK and one in New Zeland are not the same product at different prices. They serve customers with different buying habits, different ideas of what beer should cost, different delivery expectations, on top of production setups that have nothing in common. Copying their price means importing assumptions about a clientele you don't have.
I run a Beer Club at my own brewery, Sparkle, in Brittany. I priced it wrong the first time, fixed it, and watched the Club more than double in a month. Not because I found the magic number, but because I stopped guessing and derived the number from the only three things that matter: my customers, my production, and the math.
This guide is that method. At the end, there's a worksheet to run it on your own brewery. It takes under an hour, and it's the hour that decides whether your Club compounds for years or stalls in month three.
A Beer Club price doesn't need to please everyone who walks into your taproom. It needs to fit the people who actually subscribe and stay. After running my own Club and rebuilding it once, I see the same profiles show up at every brewery.
The one your price lives or dies on is the regular. The customer who already buys your beer most weeks, who wants it in the fridge as a staple, and who will keep a subscription running for years if one condition is met: the monthly amount has to be a number they can absorb every single month without thinking about it. Not a number they can justify once, in the excitement of signing up. A number that survives the twelfth appearance on their bank statement. That threshold is local. It depends on what your customers earn, what beer costs in your market, and what they already spend with you. Nobody in another country can tell you what it is.
The second profile cares less about price and more about access. They want what's hard to get: the limited releases, the special runs, the beers that sell out. They'll pay more than the regular would, but here's the trap, and I fell into it: if your most desirable beers are positioned as a premium add-on, this profile distorts your whole pricing structure while the regulars, the ones who would have stayed for years, walk away. At my brewery, the customers chasing only the rare releases churned the moment a box arrived with a lager in it. The regulars are the foundation. Price for them, and include your best beers by default rather than holding them behind a bigger number.
I've written a full breakdown of the subscriber profiles and what each one actually wants on the blog: The three people who actually sign up for your Beer Club. For pricing purposes, the rule is simple: the regular sets your price ceiling, and your best beers belong inside the standard box, not above it.
The number of beers in the box is not a marketing decision. It's a production commitment, repeated twelve times a year, including the months when everything else in the brewery is on fire.
My first Club promised twelve different beers a month in the top tier. On paper, fine. Then keg season arrived, the two months before summer when every bar and festival wants your beer, and I had to send four beers entirely into kegs. That left eight beers in cans. Every single subscriber was on the twelve-beer box. I couldn't ship a box for two months, not because production failed, but because I'd promised a number my brewery couldn't hold in its hardest season. The full story is on the blog if you want the details: Why starting with one tier is the best thing you could do.
The rule that came out of it: the right number of beers is the number you can ship in your worst month, not your best one. Look at your release calendar over the last twelve months. Find the leanest month. How many different beers did you have available in cans or bottles that month? That's your box size. Not your ambition, not what a bigger brewery ships, not what would look impressive on the page.
There's a second benefit hiding in this rule. When the box matches your real release rhythm, the Club stops being extra work. You're not brewing for the Club. The Club packages what you were brewing anyway. That's the difference between a Club that runs for years and one that quietly exhausts you.
There's an error in the opposite direction, and it's just as costly. A brewer I know runs a Club with three tiers, the smallest being four cans for €25. It looks accessible. It isn't. Once you subtract a delivery cost north of €10, the production of four cans, the packaging and the payment fees, there's almost nothing left. He's doing the work of fulfilling a subscription for a margin that doesn't justify packing the box. A Club box has fixed costs that don't shrink with the order: the same shipping, the same packing time, the same admin whether it holds four cans or twelve. Go too small and the fixed costs eat the whole thing. And it gets worse at scale, not better. A Club past 100 members is real fulfilment work every month, and a four-can box takes your team almost as long to pack as a full one for a fraction of the return. You multiply the labour and divide the margin.
So the box has a floor as well as a ceiling. Big enough that the per-box fixed costs are a reasonable fraction of the price, small enough that you can ship it in your leanest month. And a four-can tier sitting next to two others is the multi-tier comparison problem in miniature: three boxes to weigh, three prices to compare, when the entire point of a well-designed Club is one clean decision. Small and complicated is the worst of both.
With your customers and your box size in view, the price comes from three anchors. Your number needs to pass all three.
Anchor one: your own shelf
Take your candidate price and divide it by the number of beers in the box. That per-beer price goes next to what the same customer pays for the same can in your webshop or taproom. A Club member is your most loyal customer making a twelve-month commitment. The per-beer price in the box should sit at or slightly below your regular price, never above it. If joining the Club costs more per beer than just buying the cans, you're charging a fee for loyalty, and your regulars will do that math in about four seconds.
Anchor two: the statement test
Picture your regular, not your superfan, seeing the charge on their bank statement in month seven. February. No festival, no launch buzz, nothing special in the box that month. Does the number pass without a flinch? This is where ambition kills Clubs. A price that feels fine at signup and heavy in month seven doesn't produce revenue. It produces churn with a delay. When in doubt between two numbers, the lower one with twelve months of retention beats the higher one with five, every time.
Anchor three: your margin floor
The price has to leave real margin after every cost of getting the box to the door: the beer itself, the packaging, the shipping, the payment fees, the subscription tooling. The worksheet below walks through it line by line. If your candidate price passes anchors one and two but fails this one, the answer is almost never "raise the price." It's usually "adjust the box": fewer beers, lighter packaging, smarter shipping. The customer-side anchors are harder constraints than the cost side, because costs are yours to engineer and customer psychology isn't.
And one tier. One box, one price, one yes/no decision. The reasoning, and the data from my own two-tier mistake, is in the article above. For pricing purposes here, it means you only have to find one number, and all your early data tells one story.
Grab your real costs. Estimates within 10% are fine. This takes about an hour.
If you only had time for this guide, these are the articles behind it. Each one goes deeper on a piece of the method above.
The proof this guide is built on Why starting with one tier is the best thing you could do — how I priced my own Club wrong, fixed it, and doubled my members in a month.
Who you're pricing for The three people who actually sign up for your Beer Club — the subscriber profiles that decide whether your price holds.
Why the price is worth getting right Recurring revenue is the healthiest money your brewery can make — what a Club does to your brewery's finances that one-off sales never will.
Filling the Club once it's priced Your email list is the biggest asset of your Beer Club — where your first members actually come from. Two new features your Beer Club page can't do without — what the signup page itself needs to convert.
You now have a defensible price: anchored to what your customers already pay you, sized to what your brewery can actually ship, with margin you've verified line by line. That's more pricing rigor than most Beer Clubs ever get.
The last step is making it concrete. I build brand-customized Beer Club pricing cards for breweries thinking about launching: your price, your box, your beers, designed to match your store. It's free, and it's in your inbox in 5 days.