Tuesday, April 23, 2024

How We Test the Best Beer Clubs

March 2014

How We Test

With thousands of craft breweries around the world, it is nearly impossible to experience even a small percentage of the truly unique microbrews produced without joining a beer club. As a monthly beer club member, you’ll receive an exciting variety of premium, hard-to-find beers that have been carefully selected by the clubs' tasting experts. To help you make the most informed purchasing decision when shopping for a beer club membership, we joined a number of the best beer clubs and spent months evaluating them to determine how each one compared to the other.

Using a 100-point scale, we scored each club on its business/background (20 points), membership experience (25 points), beer selections (25 points), gift memberships (10 points), shipments (10 points) and member feedback (10 points). Although we spent countless hours test tasting beers, we felt that the beers in general were really good and wanted to incorporate other aspects of the clubs that we felt were important. You can review our scoring grid below or read a more in-depth breakdown of our point system in the Overview section. While some might feel that our system is subjective, we feel a set formula provides the best way to conduct an objective side-by-side comparison of the beers clubs.