Choosing a beer range for a new bottle shop

Start with fridge space and cash

Your range is limited by two physical things: how many facings fit in your fridges and how much cash you can tie up in stock. Count both before you look at a single price list.

Work it out like this. If you have two double door fridges with five shelves each and room for six facings per shelf, that is 120 facings. A line usually needs two or three facings to look stocked, so you have room for roughly 40 to 60 lines on display. Backstock sits in a cold room. Every case on the floor is cash that is not in your bank. Every case that does not sell within a few months starts to age.

Opening with 40 lines you can keep fresh beats opening with 150 that you cannot.

Cover the styles customers ask for

A new shop serves three kinds of customer: people who drink mainstream lager, people curious about craft and the enthusiasts who already know what they want. Build the range so each has an easy first choice.

• Lagers and wheat beers. Clean, familiar and the biggest share of what most Indian drinkers buy. A good craft lager and a Belgian style witbier or German hefeweizen are safe openers.
• Pale ales and IPAs. The core of craft, but also the beers that go stale fastest. Stock fewer lines and turn them quickly.
• Dark beers. One or two stouts or porters. They sell slowly in summer and better in the cooler months.
• Something different. A sour, a fruit beer or a strong Belgian ale gives enthusiasts a reason to visit. Keep it to a few lines.

Our beer styles guide is a useful map if you need to explain the range to your staff.

Local first, imports with care

Indian craft beer arrives fresher and usually costs less to carry than imported beer, which may have spent weeks at sea and in warehouses before it reaches you. Local brands also bring customers who want to support breweries they have visited.

Imports earn their place where no local brewery makes the style well, such as some Belgian and German classics. Check the packaging date on every import sample before you list it. A celebrated beer that arrives six months old will hurt your name more than the brewery's.

Which beers you may sell and from which suppliers depends on your state's excise rules and your retail licence. Rules on brand registration, label approval and pricing vary by state and change, so confirm the current position with your excise office or a licensing consultant before you build the list.

Order little and often

The common mistake is buying deep on a few lines to hit a distributor's discount. Stale stock wipes out that discount. A better opening order covers about four to six weeks of expected sales per line, with the hoppiest beers at the shorter end.

Show the working on one line. Say you expect to sell 30 cans of an IPA a week. Four weeks of stock is 120 cans, five cases of 24. If the beer has a three month shelf life and arrives one month old, you have two months to sell it. Five cases at 30 a week takes four weeks. That fits. Ten cases would not.

Repeat that sum for each line and the total opening stock falls out on its own, along with the cash you need.

Review the range every month

After the first month, rank every line by cases sold. The bottom ten per cent are candidates to drop. Look for a reason before you cut: a beer may sell slowly because it is on a bottom shelf or because nobody on the floor can describe it.

Look at margin as well as volume. A line that sells two cases a month at a healthy margin may earn more than one that sells four cases at a thin one. Price the range so customers can trade up step by step: a familiar lager at the entry point, a local craft pale ale a little above it and imports or specials at the top. Our guide to pricing a seasonal beer against the core range covers the same logic from the brewery side.

Replace dropped lines with beers customers have asked for. Keep a notebook at the till for requests, because those are free market research. Pair this with the weekly fridge checks in our guide to fridge rotation and old stock rarely builds up.

If the range keeps growing without the fridge space growing, the shop drifts towards stale beer. Hold a rule: one new line in means one slow line out.

Your first step

Measure your fridges this week. Count shelves, count facings per shelf and divide by two to get your realistic number of lines. Then write a style list against that number before you call a single distributor, so their catalogue fills your plan rather than replacing it.