INTERVIEW
Nearly 1,000 people have signed up to receive Frontaal's beer every two months, and kept paying, for years. What makes that remarkable isn't just the number. It's that they did it in the Netherlands, a home market of 17 million, without the vast audiences that make big member counts come easier in larger countries.
Nearly a thousand recurring members, in one small country, mostly from people who already knew the brewery. No vast market to lean on.
Frontaal Brewing Company is based in Breda, in the south of the Netherlands, and has run its Beer Club since around the COVID period: nine beers a box, stuffed with collabs from across Europe and Beer Club exclusives. It now moves a serious share of everything the brewery makes, and it's one of the most established Beer Clubs in European craft. I asked Guus van Nijnatten, who manages the Club, to walk me through what it actually takes from the inside.
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.
How does the Beer Club compare to wholesale on margin?
"We usually buy three or four of the nine beers from other breweries, which makes doing collabs extremely valuable for us and for them. The Dutch market is one of the biggest craft beer markets in Europe and every brewery wants to be present, so our Beer Club helps breweries a lot with reaching the right people here. But yes, the costs are real, buying a lot of beer costs a lot. In terms of margin though, it's our best sales channel next to our webshop, because it comes directly from our own facility and doesn't need to go through three margin trails: Frontaal, wholesale, then shops and bars."
That closes the loop on the revenue estimate above. The Club isn't just Frontaal's most predictable channel, it's their best-margin one, tied with the webshop, for the simplest of reasons: the beer goes straight from the brewery to the member, with no wholesale and no retail taking their cut along the way. And there's an angle in her answer that's easy to miss. A third of every box is bought in from other breweries, which turns the Club into a door into the Dutch market for them. The collabs aren't just content for the box. They're trade relationships, and they make the Club valuable to breweries far beyond Breda.
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."
Where did the first members actually come from?
"We mainly emailed everyone in our database, which is quite big as we have many investors. Our owner has been putting effort into building the database from the beginning of Frontaal, so we have an impressive amount of people involved in the company from the very start in 2015."
There's the honest answer to the question every founder asks: where do the first hundred members come from? For Frontaal, they came from an email list that had been built patiently for five years before the Club existed. One send to a database of people already invested, literally, in the brewery. It's the clearest confirmation I've seen of something I've argued before: your email list is the biggest asset of your Beer Club. The launch channel isn't something you find at launch. It's something you build for years before you need it.
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 tool 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 system 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.
How did you land on the price?
"We have a huge margin calculation system for our webshop. We keep our Beer Club under the prices of our webshop, so our most loyal customers always have the best deal when subscribed. The longer you stay subscribed, the lower the price. And our investors get 10% off the Beer Club, which is the best deal you can get."
Underneath the calculation system sits one simple rule, and it's the part worth stealing: the Club is always cheaper than the webshop. Frontaal's most loyal customers are never the ones paying the most. That sounds obvious, but plenty of businesses get it backwards and quietly charge their regulars full price while discounting to attract strangers. Frontaal prices the other way around, and it gives every member a permanent, rational reason to stay subscribed. If you're setting a price for your own Club, that's the benchmark to start from: not other Clubs, but your own webshop, with the Club sitting reliably below it.
Why every two months rather than monthly?
"Two main reasons. The first: the main reason people cancelled was that the beer was piling up in their fridge. For a lot of beer geeks nine beers a month doesn't sound like much, but because of the variety of styles, people picked their moments to drink. Retention is way better now, because besides the amount of beer, it's also literally half the price. The second: we changed our release calendar from four specials a month to two, so it made sense to change the setup of the Beer Club with it."
This might be the most valuable answer in the whole interview, because it's a retention lesson nobody talks about. People weren't cancelling over price or quality. They were cancelling because the beer arrived faster than they drank it. The fridge filled up, the guilt set in, and the easiest fix was to unsubscribe. Frontaal's solution was to ship less: half the frequency, half the monthly cost, same box. Cancellations dropped. It cuts against every growth instinct, which says send more, sell more, but the constraint that matters is how fast your members actually drink. And the second reason deserves its own note: when the brewery halved its special releases, the Club followed the production calendar, not the other way around. The Club serves the brewery's rhythm. Design yours around what you actually release, and around what a normal fridge can hold.
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 the lessons 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. The shipping rhythm should follow how fast members actually drink, not how much you'd like to sell: Frontaal halved their frequency and retention improved. The launch channel is the email list you build years before you need it. Members should always get a better price than your webshop, so that loyalty is permanently the best deal in the house. 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 for her time, her openness, and her 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 the Beer Club at frontaalbrewingcompany.com.
This interview is part of a series: inside the best Beer Clubs in the world, with the brewers who run them, on what works, what breaks, and what it takes. Keep going:
Inside Garage Project's Beer Club: a FRESH IPA, every month, forever. One of the world's most inventive breweries chose to build its Club on a single style. On purpose.
Why everywhere treats its Beer Club as a community first, and revenue second. Fewer than 10% of members lost in four years. Here's what that takes.