Bluewood Brewing launches 'Inner Ring,' its new public membership program -

If you’re a lover of Barrel Aged beers, then this week’s announcement by Bluewood Brewing should be of great interest to you. The Cherokee Street brewery announced it’s offering a public membership program for the first time. “Inner Ring” memberships are now available for enrollment through the end of this year, or until their maximum capacity is reached.

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Bluewood Brewing and the Inner Ring

“The name “Inner Ring” is our reference to the age rings inside a tree as each year passes, the older rings being the center-most and the lighter thicker rings tend to be from the growing season and darker from the late season/fall when growth slows down,” said Bluewood’s Cameron Lund.

There will be two tiers of memberships. Tier 1 is called Heartwood ($270) and is designed for barrel-aged enthusiasts. Members will receive:

(6) Barrel-Aged Bottles – Two of Which are Member Only (Includes a Leviathan Variant)
First Access to Public Barrel-Aged Bottle Releases
10% Discount On Draft Pours & Merch
(4) Member Exclusive 4-Packs (or 2-Packs if Beer is Barrel-Aged)
At Least (8) Unique Members Only Draft Offerings
Members Only Party
Members Only Glass
Monthly Member Newsletter and Facebook Group Access
Right of First Refusal for 2024 Membership

Tier 2 is called Springwood ($115) and provides:

10% Discount On Draft Pours & Merch
(4) Member Exclusive 4-Packs (or 2-Packs if Beer is Barrel-Aged)
At Least (8) Unique Members Only Draft Offerings
Members Only Party
Members Only Glass
Monthly Member Newsletter and Facebook Group Access

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Creating a membership opportunity for customers is something Bluewood has always wanted to offer, but there were a lot of factors leading up to its later-than-desired release.

“Of course the pandemic, but we really wanted to bolster our barrel library to a sustainable level to be able to routinely draw and replenish it,” said Lund. “We also wanted to gather as much feedback from peers and the public to develop the best structure that we could possibly offer to our eventual members which took some time and research.”

Several breweries have told me that creating a membership apparatus where customers pay in advance of receiving products has allowed them to improve the customer experience.

Lund agrees.

“It definitely allows us to immediately reinvest into the membership and its future right off the bat. A large expense for such a small brewery like us is sunk into costly batches that require long maturation times that these memberships usually target and ours is no outlier. This cost only gets reconciled further down the line,” said Lund.

This is why membership fees give breweries some flexibility in offering more options and privileges in the future.

“Crawling out of the crisis that was the pandemic was very hard, so for us to feel like we can finally offer and support something like this is a major victory for us for sure,” said Lund.

Bluewood is hoping customers will feel they are getting back what they put in financially, both in terms of product and the experience they share with the Bluewood family.

“If someone joins, we aim to keep them as we would rather grow our customer family than to constantly turn it over,” said Lund. “If the majority of our members feel satisfied with their membership, then we feel both customer and brewery are getting a much better experience than if we were to simply not offer the membership at all.”

Membership is open online through December 31, 2022.

Bluewood Brewing
1821 Cherokee St.
St. Louis, MO 63118