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How to price your Beer Club
Find the right price for your Beer Club: what to charge, how many beers, and the math that makes it work.
The first thing most breweries do when they design a Beer Club is look at what other Clubs charge. Cloudwater sits at one number, Garage Project on the other side of the world at another, the brewery down the road at something else entirely. 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 Manchester and one in Wellington 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 built the price from three things: my customers, my production, and a simple floor-and-ceiling check anyone can run.
This guide is that method. At the end, there's an interactive worksheet that runs it on your own brewery in about a minute, and it's the minute 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 join 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 membership 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 member 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: price for the regular, the customer who has to absorb the charge every month, and include your best beers in the standard box rather than holding them behind a bigger number.
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 in cans. And every single member was on the twelve-beer box. 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 packing a Club box 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.
This is how I set a price, and it's the approach that worked for my own brewery. Take it as a starting point, not a rule. Your market, your positioning and your customers might point somewhere different, and you know them better than anyone. What follows is a way to think it through, not the only answer.
Your box size gives you something to price. Now you find two lines, a floor and a ceiling, and aim for a price that sits between them. That's the whole method. Below the floor you lose money. Above the ceiling your customers are better off buying the cans one by one. The right Club price is the sandwich in the middle.
You already sell your beer to bars and shops at a wholesale price. That number, ex-VAT, is the most reliable floor you have, more reliable than a cost-of-goods calculation most breweries never finish. Your prices vary across beers and across the year, so use an average: take what you actually charged the trade per can over the last twelve months, not the price of one specific release. Build the floor like this:
That last 10% matters. You will always lose some boxes to breakage, damage in transit, a bottle that arrives broken and has to be replaced. If you price right at cost, one broken box wipes out the margin on several others. The 10% is your safety buffer, so the floor stays a real floor. The goal on the floor isn't to be tight on margin. It's to never sell a box for less than it truly costs you to send.
Drop below this line and you're selling your Beer Club for less than you charge a wholesaler, while doing the picking, packing and shipping yourself. That's the one thing the floor exists to prevent.
The ceiling is what the same customer would pay to buy those beers themselves, one by one, on your webshop. Same logic on the average: use your typical webshop price per can across the year, not a single SKU. Build it like this:
A Club member is your most loyal customer, on a twelve-month commitment. If the Club costs more than buying the same beers individually, you're charging a fee for loyalty, and your regulars will do that math in about four seconds. The Club price has to land at or below this ceiling, always.
Now you have two lines. Your Club price goes between them: above the floor, at or below the ceiling. That gap is your room to work. Pick a number inside it that feels right for your customers, and you have a price that protects your margin and rewards your members at the same time. The next section is how you pressure-test the number you picked.
And one box, one price. The reasoning, and the data from my own two-tier mistake, is in the article above. For pricing, it means you only have to find one number, and all your early data tells one story.
This worksheet turns the method above into your own number. Set your currency and VAT rate, then work down the steps: your box size, what each box costs you to send (your floor), and what those beers are worth on your shop (your ceiling). Enter a Club price and it tells you, live, whether you're sitting safely between the two, and what the recurring revenue looks like as your members grow. Nothing is saved and nothing is shared. It's just a calculator for your eyes.
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 member 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. And 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: above the floor, so every box earns at least what the trade pays you, and at or below the ceiling, so it never costs your most loyal customers more than buying the beers one by one. 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.