Preparing for a morning of bottling circa 2022.
Are you part of an awesome brewery bottle club?
Or part of one in the past?
I suspect a lot more of you answered yes to the latter than the former. There seems to be fewer of them in 2024 than ten years ago, and my own limited research seems to support that observation. You may think that the scarcity of brewery bottle clubs would drive up demand, but there are a litany of reasons for why that isn’t the case, some of which I will get into with varying levels of detail.
Full disclosure, I have been part of a brewery bottle club; specifically, The Rare Barrel’s Ambassadors of Sour club, and it was simultaneously amazing and overwhelming. We still have a few dozen bottles aging, which reminds me that I need to bring one of those out for the next family pizza night.
Brewery bottle clubs are a phenomenal way to collect rare releases, share epic beers with friends, and build an unrivaled beer cellar. There is little downside for the craft beer consumer, with one notable exception being the obligatory expansion of the space required to age beer in one’s home.
We get asked about an Autumn Arch Bottle Club fairly often. Our vision for the club would be to deliver authentic and complex beers with high character, uniqueness, and above all - be interesting.
Sounds great, right?! But we’re not going to have a bottle club.
Here’s why:
This would have been a great bottle club beer…
First off, know that we took a deliberate approach in coming to this decision. The brew team went deep into researching bottle clubs, both successful and unsuccessful, and we consulted with other breweries that have an active bottle club or hosted them in the past. There are definitely pros to hosting a bottle club, Here are a few:
Builds a community of strong supporters and brand ambassadors with access to exclusive beers
Potential to build brewery reputation in the area
Predictable revenue stream for the brewery
But there are also a boatload of cons as well. I will expand on these since I already gave away the conclusion that we’re not planning to host a bottle club.
#1) We make a lot of sour beers, so a significant portion of the bottle club would be comprised of sour beers. I love them. But they have a limited (but passionate!) following. This would be off-putting to a larger majority of folks who love epic beers but not barrel-aged sours. An obvious solution here would be a “Sour Only Bottle Club” but sours can be prickly and sometimes work on their own schedule, which does not lend itself well to the more rigid schedule that a bottle club would require. If this was the only con, we would work around it, but continue on intrepid reader….
#2) A bottle club is a lot of work to pull off well, and it can damage the brewery’s reputation if executed poorly. While we would not start a bottle club planning to screw up in our execution, sometimes stuff happens. Especially when one endeavors to manufacture a series of epic/bottle-club-worthy beers. Remember the bottles of our 3rd Anniversary stout??? You definitely do not because we screwed it up and didn’t release it (~10% of the bottles did not carbonate…the subsequent root cause analysis will be the topic of a future blog post). If the brewery’s top cash flow vector was a bottle club, and please note that it definitely would not be, we would prioritize our attention to drive ‘screw-ups’ to zero. I’m confident we could do that. But here’s the rub: # 3.
#3) The value proposition for a bottle club isn’t great because epic beer is everywhere. Literally, you can trip over it in any given Delaware shopping center. Don’t get me wrong - I think this is a win for craft beer enthusiasts and America in general. But it definitely diminishes the exclusivity that being in a bottle club entails. And therefore makes the proposition for joining one harder for us to make. This threatens the ‘predictable revenue stream’ listed as a pro above.
#4) “The bottle club is one of my favorite ideas that just never pans out” - Anonymous mid-western brewery owner. To paraphrase the main message from all the breweries that we spoke to which previously had bottle clubs: Don’t overcomplicate the task of making and selling badass beers. Managing the commitments of a bottle club would likely make that task more complicated and increase the likelihood of us stumbling into #2 above.
#5) A brewery in Delaware cannot ship beer directly to consumers (the industry calls this DTC for short). Thus, our bottle club would likely be restricted to folks in the greater Newark area and a minority of folks willing to drive further to pick up. This would add to the challenge of selling the number of memberships required to make the club worth the effort on the brewery side.
That was a lot of negativity on bottle clubs. Apologies for that. Normally, we are extremely optimistic about all things beer (we work at a brewery after all), but we had to be realistic before diving in with the significant commitments and expectations that go along with hosting a successful bottle club.
However, there is good news here! Autumn Arch will continue to release 8 to 10 epic bottles throughout the year (on our own low-pressure timeline), and you won’t have to join a bottle club to get in on the action!
I think of this path as maintaining super-low expectations and significantly over-delivering. It’s a win for everyone.
With all that said, we reserve the right to change our minds* and start a bottle club at any point in the future. You know, because businesses need to stay flexible :)
Since you are subscribed to our eNewsletter (and if you’re not, now might be the time to change that…at the bottom of this page), you will get plenty of heads up on our upcoming releases.
Speaking of which, we have one coming up - Dark Chaos. It’s a decadent Baklava Imperial Stout releasing on Thursday February 29 as part of our Hibernation Night event. Drop in, try the 8 (!?) new beers we’ll have on tap, and perhaps indulge in a “non-bottle club” bottle release.
*extremely unlikely.