Boreal Brewing is one of eleven concept designs I’ve built to show what a properly considered website looks like in a specific industry. There is no Boreal Brewing. It’s a fully realized site for a Northern Ontario craft brewery that doesn’t exist yet. Real strategy, real code, ready to ship the day somebody calls.
This post is the walkthrough. If you run a brewery, a taproom, a restaurant, or any small hospitality business, the choices here transfer.
What was the brief?
I wrote myself a one-line brief and worked from it:
A bold, atmospheric site for a Northern Ontario craft brewery. Showcases the beer menu, taproom experience, and events. Built to drive foot traffic and online orders.
Four words in there did most of the work. Atmospheric. Menu. Taproom. Drive. Each one pulled the design in a specific direction.
Atmosphere has to come before information
Most brewery sites I looked at while researching this fall into one of two ruts. The Squarespace template version: clean, generic, the same site as the dental clinic across the street with different photos. Or the over-designed one: wild fonts, parallax everywhere, beer names in stylized type you can’t actually read.
The mistake is the same in both cases. They treat the website like an information document instead of like being in the taproom.
The Boreal homepage opens with a dark, photographic hero. Warm low-light brewery interior, a glass in focus, taproom blur behind it. The headline isn’t “Welcome to Boreal Brewing.” It’s “Brewed in the North. Poured slow.” That’s not a tagline. It’s a mood. Right underneath, the page gets concrete (where they are, what’s pouring, when the taproom is open) but the first hit is atmosphere.
This is the single biggest decision on any hospitality site. If the hero feels generic, the rest of the site can’t recover. The menu page can be perfect and the visitor has already decided you’re forgettable.
The menu is the homepage
Hospitality sites almost always bury what’s on tap. Hours, About, Events, then Menu, usually inside a dropdown.
For a brewery that’s wrong. The beer is the product. A visitor lands with one of three questions in their head: what’s on right now, are you open, how do I get there.
Boreal answers all three above the fold. An “On tap this week” strip with four to six beers, each one showing the name, style, ABV, and a small can or glass photo. A status indicator that says “Taproom open today, 12 to 11” with a green dot and a strip showing the days that differ from default. A map link pinned in the header on every page.
Everything else lives further down or on a dedicated page. The story, the brewing process, the events, the merch. The homepage is a menu and a status board, dressed up.
The taproom story as an editorial scroll, not an About page
The “About us” page on most brewery sites is six paragraphs about how the founders met at a cottage and started homebrewing in a garage. Nobody reads it. I don’t read it and I’m researching brewery sites for a living.
For Boreal I built the story as an editorial scroll. Full-width photos alternating with short paragraphs, maybe sixty words each, about the brewing process, the people, the space. It reads like a magazine feature, not a corporate About page.
This costs more to produce because you need real photography. But it pays back two ways. Visitors actually scroll through it, so engagement metrics climb. And the imagery is reusable across Instagram, paid ads, and partner placements. The cost amortizes.
What “drive” actually means
The brief said drive. So the question becomes drive what, and how do you know.
For a brewery, three things matter:
- Foot traffic to the taproom, measured indirectly through clicks on the map link, the directions button, and views on the “on tap” strip.
- Online orders and merch sales. Direct conversion, easy to track.
- Event RSVPs and private bookings. The calendar fills up or it doesn’t.
So the site has three explicit conversion paths, each surfaced where it belongs. A “Get directions” button in the header and footer on every page. “Shop merch” and “Order online” in the main nav. “Book the taproom” as the CTA on the events page and at the bottom of the homepage.
No “Contact us” form for general inquiries. Brewery customers don’t want to email a brewery. They want to walk in. The contact form lives only on the Private bookings page, where it’s the right tool for the job.
What would change for a real brewery
The concept is built as a single-location, single-purpose site. A real brewery hits cases this design doesn’t handle the second you talk to them.
Multiple locations need a location switcher in the header and per-location hours, menus, and contact. Wholesale and distribution need a “find us in stores” map and a wholesale inquiry path that doesn’t share a form with private bookings. A beer release calendar needs a CMS pattern so the brewer can post a new release without touching code.
None of those break the design. They extend it. But they’re the kind of thing that comes out of a real conversation with a real client, which is why the concept is a concept and not a template.
The takeaway for hospitality
If you run a brewery, restaurant, taproom, or café and you look at your site thinking this doesn’t feel like us, the fix is rarely a redesign. It’s a re-decision. About what the site is for, who it’s for, and what action it’s trying to drive.
The visual layer follows from those decisions. Skip them and you end up with a tidy Squarespace site that looks fine and converts at 0.4%.
See the full concept
The full Boreal Brewing walkthrough (homepage, menu, events, the editorial scroll, all of it) lives in the concept designs section. Have a look. Steal what works for your own brief.
Bunker41 builds custom websites and web apps for small businesses in Sault Ste. Marie and across Northern Ontario. If you’d like a Boreal-style treatment for your own business, say hello.