New subscription service delivers craft beer to your door

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With the hundreds of new beers brewed in BC, there’s no way for even the most ardent connoisseur to try everything. Now think for a minute about the newbie, who’s interested in craft beer but is inundated with a stupefying amount of choices.

Where do they begin?

Now Pint Post, a new Vancouver startup, is aiming to solve this problem by delivering a curated package of the latest and greatest BC craft beers every month, right to your door.

“My ideal customer range is from anyone who is starting out in craft beer to craft beer experts,” says Pint Post founder Ryan Tessier. “Even the experts aren’t able to try everything

“The goal here is to open it up to people who are interested in beer but don’t really know where to start. This will give them a chance to experience anything from an entry-level IPA all the way to up an experimental sour.”

Pint Post will deliver all over BC, and as a result will provide people from all corners of the province the opportunity to try beers that wouldn’t otherwise be available in their markets.

Starting in October – just in time for BC Craft Beer Month – Pint Post will deliver a package containing approximately two litres of BC beer (“We don’t want to overwhelm people with too much per month,” Tessier says), which will be themed around seasonal trends and will arrive in an assortment of cans and bottles

A corporate service is also available to Vancouver businesses, which will include a much larger package of up to 7.8 litres of beer, with between six to eight different beers per month. Customizable gift boxes will also be available, which will be curated to individual tastes in collaboration between the Pint Post team and the customer.

Tessier – who works full time in public relations, but is also abeer judge and beer writer who’s contributed to Daily Hive, Vancouver is Awesome and Huffington Post – will curate the monthly packages himself.

The idea was conceived after Tessier and his business partner, George Danes, were searching for ways to expose more people to the increasingly wide variety of craft beer now available in the province. Originally, the idea was to create an “an Uber for craft beer,” delivering beer on demand, but BC regulations made that impossible.

“It got too complicated,” Tessier says. “It became really, really difficult for us to work around the regulations, and there wasn’t really a profit margin there.”

So they conceived of the subscription service instead, inspired by similar delivery services in Alberta and Ontario. The problem, though, is that Alberta and Ontario are relatively lax on alcohol delivery services. BC, Tessier says, is “a little behind the eight-ball.”

“It’s been a bit tricky to start out,” he says. “I can’t warehouse anything – I need to be a distributor to do that.”

This means Pint Posts can’t purchase any beer until a purchase order has been made, which requires that Tessier needs to plan out the monthly packages in advance. All this can be tricky acquiring limited brews or popular seasonals.

But Tessier says there are workarounds and he’s working with breweries on how to deliver the freshest product. He says the plan is to grow Pint Post’s subscriber base to the point where breweries will offer exclusive releases that won’t otherwise be available on the market.

Individual subscriptions begin at $39.95 monthly and business subscriptions begin at $149.95 monthly. Tessier says they’ve capped the initial run of “VIP” subscribers at 500, which is 80 per cent full. The service will then be available to everyone once the e-commerce site is up and running later this month.

For more information, or to sign up on the waiting list, visit PintPost.com.

Photo via iStock

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