If you're about to launch a Beer Club, the smart-sounding move is to offer two or three pricing tiers. A small box, a larger box, maybe a premium one with the rare stuff. Different customers want different things, the logic goes, so multiple options means more reach and more revenue.
It's a tidy argument. It's also wrong for most Beer Clubs in their first months
Here are the three reasons starting with a single tier is almost always the better move, and then the story of how I learned each one by getting it wrong at my own brewery.
1. A multi-tier page is a comparison problem dressed up as a choice. Visitors who land on a Beer Club page with two or three pricing cards stop being customers and start being shoppers. They compare value per beer. They weigh which size fits their fridge. They open a tab to think it over. A page with one offer asks a yes/no question they can answer in five seconds. A page with three offers asks them to do research first, and most of them don't.
2. The cheaper tier rarely catches the customers it's designed for. The intuition is that the smaller box catches the budget-conscious customer. In practice, when the larger tier has a desirable feature attached (rare beers, more volume, exclusive access), the smaller tier doesn't function as an accessible entry point. It functions as a comparison that makes the larger tier feel mandatory. Budget-conscious customers don't trade down. They leave.
3. The data you collect is fragmented before you've understood it. A Beer Club's first months aren't about revenue. They're about learning who clicks subscribe, what they drink, what makes them stay. Two tiers split that learning across two populations before either has enough subscribers to tell you anything reliable. Every subsequent decision becomes a guess against unclear signal.
Those reasons exist in every pricing book on the shelf. Here's why I'm writing about them anyway: I made all three mistakes myself, on my own brewery, in the first three months of running a Beer Club.
I launched the Beer Club at Sparkle, my brewery in Brittany, with two tiers.
The standard box: eight different beers a month for €60. The larger box: twelve different beers a month for €84, with access to our ULTRA IPAs (dry-hopped at over 30 grams per litre, our most sought-after releases). The logic sounded smart in the planning document. Two options means reach. The ULTRAs become the lever that nudges customers from €60 to €84.
First month: eighteen subscribers. All eighteen chose the €84 tier. Zero subscribed to €60. Zero.
That number was the entire lesson, compressed. I hadn't built two tiers. I'd built one offer with a decoy attached. The €60 box existed on the page, but commercially it was invisible. Customers didn't see two options. They saw the real Beer Club and the version without the good beers. Nobody chose to be the person who got the box without the good beers.
You could verify this from the festival floor. People would tell me €84 was too expensive. I'd point at the €60 tier. They'd say: "yes, but the ULTRAs aren't in it." The cheaper tier wasn't an accessible entry point. It was a frame that made the more expensive one feel mandatory, and customers who couldn't justify €84 simply walked away.
Then the second problem showed up. Twelve different beers a month is a lot of beer. I don't drink twelve different beers a month, and I run the brewery. Several of those eighteen subscribers paused or cancelled within a few months. The volume outpaced what they could actually consume, and €84 every month is a number that customers notice on their statement.
And then production broke. In the two months before summer, demand for kegs went through the roof, the way it always does at that point in the year for any brewery selling to bars and festivals. I sent four of our beers entirely into kegs to meet it. That left me with eight beers available in cans those two months. Eight is exactly what the €60 tier promised. Eight is four short of what the €84 tier promised.
Here is where the design failure became total. All eighteen subscribers were on the €84 tier. The €60 tier I could have shipped without issue had zero subscribers on it. I couldn't deliver any boxes those two months, not because production had failed, but because my tier design had pushed every single customer onto the only box the brewery couldn't make that season. Either problem on its own would have been survivable. Together, they were not.
After three months, I pulled both tiers and relaunched with a single offer at €60: eight different beers a month, ULTRA IPAs included.
That last detail mattered. The original plan used the ULTRAs as a lever to push customers from €60 to €84. Three months of data said the lever didn't work the way I'd assumed. Customers weren't choosing between a standard box and a premium upgrade. They were treating the ULTRAs as the actual product, and the €60 box as a defective version of it. The honest move was to stop pretending the ULTRAs were a premium feature and treat them as the standard.
When I announced the migration, some subscribers asked to stay at twelve beers a month. Not because they wanted access to anything specific. They just wanted the volume. Twelve beers of our beer was what they wanted to receive, regardless of which beers were in the box. They weren't paying for rarity. They were paying for quantity of the brewery they liked.
At the same time, the customers who had been most enthusiastic about the ULTRA IPAs (the ones who'd driven me to design the €84 tier in the first place) churned the moment a box arrived with a lager or a pale ale in it. They weren't subscribers to the brewery. They were subscribers to the rare stuff, which is a different thing entirely.
The customers who churned were the ones I'd built the premium tier for. The customers who would have stayed forever were the ones I'd nearly forced into a smaller box they didn't want. I couldn't have known any of that on day one. I had to ship a real, single offer, watch who showed up, and listen.
What I learned from that migration is that the people who subscribe to a Beer Club fall into a small number of clearly different profiles, and most breweries are designing for the wrong one. I've written about the three I see again and again, and what each one actually wants, in the article linked at the end of this one.
One tier is not forever. It's the starting move. After three to six months of running a single offer, you have real data: how many subscribers, how long they stay, what they ask for, what they complain about. That's when a second tier becomes a real decision rather than a guess.
For Sparkle, the data has pointed at a specific second tier: a larger box for the customers who explicitly asked for more volume. Twelve beers a month, with eight different beers and four duplicates pulled from what we already have in stock. Same beers as the €60 tier, ULTRAs included by default, just more of them. The differentiation isn't access to anything special. It's quantity, for customers who already love what we make and want more of it. That design fits a real customer profile and fits what the brewery can actually produce. Neither was visible to me on day one.
Start with one. Earn the second.
Read next: The three people who actually sign up for your Beer Club.
