Brauwerk Hoffman
Brauwerk HoffmanThe Challenge
Brauwerk Hoffman is a German-inspired microbrewery and seasonal brewpub in Campbell's Bay, the first in the Pontiac, founded in 2018 by Todd Hoffman. It is a short drive across the river from Arnprior and a real destination on a summer weekend.
Two things made this harder than a normal restaurant site. The brewery is seasonal, so for half the year every page has to say something different about hours, events, and whether you can turn up at all. And it is in Quebec, so English and French are not a nice-to-have, they are the requirement.
The third constraint was maintenance. There is no marketing department. Whoever updates the beer list needs to be able to do exactly that and nothing else, with no chance of breaking the site by clicking the wrong thing.
The Approach
WordPress, but not the way most breweries end up with it. A full-site-editing block theme where theme.json is the design system, so colour, type and spacing are defined once and every template reads from them. No Bootstrap, no Google Fonts, no jQuery. Fonts are self-hosted: ITC Korinna for headings, Source Serif 4 for body copy.
Beers, events and menu items are custom post types with real fields rather than paragraphs. A beer has a style, an ABV, a label image, and a flag for whether it is on tap right now. That is what lets the beer list, the archive and the 3D can all read from one source instead of three people keeping three lists in sync.
The can is geometry, not a photograph. It renders in WebGL with the decoder self-hosted rather than pulled from a CDN, and it falls back to a pre-rendered image the moment WebGL is unavailable, so nobody lands on an empty rectangle.
Season status is one switch. Flipping it changes the hero badge, the hours and the copy about what is open, in both languages, from a single screen. The editor's sidebar shows Beers, Events, Menu, Media and Season Status. Everything else is blocked at the address, not merely hidden from the menu, because hiding a link does not deny access to the page behind it.
The Result
The rebuild is finished and in pre-launch review, running in both languages while the last hosting items are settled. It replaces a Bootstrap theme that pulled fonts, framework CSS and animation libraries from three external domains on every page load.
Every page ships in English and French with matching content, which for a Quebec business is a legal position as much as a design one. The one gap is known and stated plainly: the beer and events archives still carry English URL slugs on the French side, a limit of the free translation plugin. We are hand-rolling the two rewrites rather than buying a licence to fix two URLs.
It launches at brauwerk-hoffman.ca.