Beer makes a great gift, especially if you can do the shopping yourself at your favorite bottleshop and then deliver the package in person, but that’s not always possible. If you’re not a beer geek, it’s hard to know which beers will excite your beer-loving friend. Maybe the recipient doesn’t live nearby. Maybe you’ve procrastinated and now find yourself in a pickle. Maybe what you need is a thoughtful, carefully curated beer gift delivered right to the beer lover’s door.
Fear not! I have a couple of suggestions that beer-loving family members or friends will appreciate. One caveat, beer shipments like these have to be signed for by a legal-aged adult.
Beermonthclub.com – Highly Customizable, Very Well Curated
The folks at monthlyclubs.com offer five different beer clubs at beermonthclub.com, their beer-centric website. They’ve got this “club” thing figured out! You do not have to purchase a year-long club membership. Whichever club you choose, you can select to have it consist of just two shipments. In fact, you can choose however many months you want and you can choose when the shipments begin. You can choose how often to have the beer shipped: monthly, every other month, or quarterly. In some cases, you can even customize how many beers are included in each shipment. This highly customizable approach is what sets beermonthclub.com apart, especially when giving a membership as a gift.
One of my favorite features of the clubs at beermonthclubs.com, each shipment comes with information sheets about the beers and the breweries. Not just a top-level overview, but some real detail about the beers and the breweries. Beer nerds, like me, love that stuff!
As far as the five clubs go, the most affordable option is the US Microbrewed Beer Club. Each shipment consists of 12 beers from two different lightly distributed U.S. Microbreweries: four different beers, three of each style. For example, some of the recent shipments included beers from Flying Fish Brewing (New Jersey), Tommyknocker Brewing (Colorado), Spencer Brewing (Massachusetts) and DuClaw Brewing (Maryland). The club is just $29.95 /mo. plus $15.00 S&H. Minimum two shipments (two months).
The Rare Beer Club is the most expensive of the beer clubs. Each shipment includes two, four or six, 750-milliliter bottles of hand-crafted, limited release, artisanal beers from two of the world’s best brewers. These are not beers you’ll see at the local grocery store. In fact, the beer geeks at the bottleshop probably can’t even get their hands on these babies. For example, I recently received my Rare Beer Club shipment and it included a bottle of To Øl from Belgium’s esteemed Chateau Øl brewery. The same shipment also included a bottle of Cyclo Stout from Pasteur Street Brewing of Saigon, Vietnam. Yeah, baby! The Rare Beer Club starts at $37.95 /mo. plus $14.00 S&H. Minimum two shipments (two months).
Discount codes, we got ’em. Use these discount codes at checkout: SAVE10 ($10 off any 4-shipment order), SAVE15 ($15 off any prepaid 6-shipment order), SAVE 30 ($30 off any prepaid 12-shipment order.)
Note – beermonthclub.com sent me a Rare Beer Club shipment at no cost but did not ask or require me to include them in this article, I just like their program. No quid pro quo.
Savor the Taste of Tavour
Probably the best-loved online beer shopping site, Tavour offers a couple ways to give the gift of beer.
Send the gift of Tavour beer money. The lucky recipient gets to choose from Tavour’s growing and evolving beer inventory. They even offer an app (for iOS and Android) to make shopping with Tavor beer money even more fun. Your e-gift card is delivered instantly and the physical card is mailed within one business day.
A bit more personalized, send a Tavour gift box. Each gift box is carefully curated by the experts at Tavour. There are four different themed beer experiences from which you choose. The “sample packs” go for $35 for 3 bottles or up to 6 cans. The “gift box sets” go for $99 for 8 bottles or up to 16 cans. Shipping is free!