Brauwerk Hoffman
Brauwerk HoffmanWhat Brauwerk Hoffman needed
Brauwerk Hoffman is a German-inspired microbrewery and seasonal brewpub in Campbell's Bay, the Pontiac's first by the brewery's own account, 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 about seven months of 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 the requirement from the first page.
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.
How we built it
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.
How it turned out
The rebuild went live at brauwerk-hoffman.ca on September 12, 2026, in both languages. It replaces a theme that pulled fonts, framework CSS and animation libraries from three outside domains on every page load.
Every page ships in English and French with matching content, which for a Quebec business is table stakes. Season status is a single switch: the hero badge, the hours and the copy about what is open change together, in both languages, from one screen.
The cutover was rehearsed before it was run, and the previous site was kept whole on the server behind a one-command rollback. Nobody at the brewery had to be standing by on launch day.