A microbrewery website operates across three distinct revenue channels with three distinct customer audiences — the consumer visiting the taproom, the craft-beer enthusiast ordering mixed cases online for home, and the publican or off-trade buyer placing wholesale cask, keg or can orders. The website’s job is to serve each channel cleanly with its own architecture, while handling alcohol-licensing compliance (Premises Licence, age verification, AWRS registration) correctly.
What is different about microbrewery websites
Four things make microbrewery web design distinct from generic food-and-drink web design. First, the three-channel architecture is operationally fundamental — taproom, DTC e-commerce, trade ordering all need separate paths and separate schema treatment. Second, the alcohol-licensing landscape is real — Licensing Act 2003 Premises Licence conditions, age-verification at online checkout (statutory under the Challenge 25 framework), HMRC Alcohol Wholesaler Registration Scheme (AWRS) for wholesale sales since 2017. Third, the craft-beer customer audience is unusually informed — beer drinkers paying £6-£10 for a 4-pack of craft beer want hop varieties, malt bill, fermentation details, and the product detail templates do not deliver. Fourth, the SIBA / Cask Marque / Real Ale accreditation landscape carries weight with the craft-beer-aware customer.
What we ship for a microbrewery
A bespoke microbrewery website with the three-channel architecture (taproom / DTC / trade) as separate landings, individual product pages for each beer with full technical detail, age-verification on the online checkout, AWRS-compliant trade ordering flow, SIBA / Cask Marque / AWRS credentialing panel, taproom event listings with Event schema where applicable, the brewery-story and named-team profiles, the standard contact and visiting-information block, and the full FoodEstablishment (Brewery) + LocalBusiness + Service + Product schema graph.
The three-channel architecture in detail
Taproom channel — the brewery’s on-site retail and hospitality offering. The landing covers opening hours, food offering or food-residency programme, seasonal events, taproom-only releases, parking, public transport access, group bookings and brewery tours. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) channel — online beer sales shipped nationwide. The landing covers the available case formats (mixed cases, single-style cases, gift packs), the shipping schedule (typical Monday-Wednesday-Friday despatch with next-day or 48-hour delivery), refrigerated-courier where applicable, the age-verification process at checkout, the broken-bottle replacement policy. Trade channel — wholesale orders for pubs, restaurants and off-trade retailers. The landing covers the available dispense formats (cask 9-gallon firkin and 18-gallon kilderkin, keg 30L and 50L, can 330ml and 440ml in cases, bottle 330ml and 500ml), the standard wholesale pricing tier, the minimum order quantity, the delivery schedule by postcode area, the account-opening process.
The beer-range product detail
Each beer in the range gets its own URL with the technical detail craft-beer customers actually read. ABV (typical session 3.5-4.5%, standard 4.5-5.5%, strong 5.5-7%, double 7%+). IBU bittering value. Hop bill — specific hop varieties used (Mosaic, Citra, Galaxy, Simcoe, Centennial, Cascade, Amarillo, Mosaic, Nelson Sauvin, Idaho 7 for the New World hop palette; EKG, Fuggles, Bramling Cross, Goldings, Challenger for the traditional UK palette; Saaz, Tettnang, Spalter for the Continental palette). Malt bill — base malts (Maris Otter, Golden Promise, Pilsner, Vienna) and speciality malts (crystal, chocolate, Munich, wheat, oats). Fermentation style — clean ale, dry-hopped, hazy IPA, lager, lacto-soured, wild-yeast, mixed-culture, barrel-aged. Food pairing notes from the brewer’s perspective. Dispense format availability and seasonal availability.
The alcohol-compliance layer
Three statutory frameworks the site handles correctly. Premises Licence under the Licensing Act 2003 — the brewery’s premises licence and the conditions attaching to it (typically related to opening hours, off-sales, age-verification policy). Age-verification at online checkout — statutory under the Challenge 25 framework, with an age-confirmation step at the start of checkout and a delivery-driver verification commitment from the chosen carrier (DPD, ParcelForce or DX all support age-restricted delivery). AWRS (Alcohol Wholesaler Registration Scheme) — HMRC registration required since April 2017 for any UK business selling alcohol to other businesses for resale. The AWRS number is rendered on the trade channel landing and trade buyers can verify with HMRC.
What we deliberately do not build
No bespoke brewery production-management software — Beerstro, BeerSmith and the dedicated brewery-ERP platforms (Ekos, Beer30) handle production tracking, raw-material management and excise-duty calculation better. No live-chat — the considered-purchase audience for craft beer does not respond to it. No bespoke ratings-and-review widget — Untappd is the dominant beer-rating platform and the site links cleanly to the brewery’s Untappd profile rather than replicating the functionality.
Pricing for a microbrewery website
Most independent single-site microbreweries land on Growth (£899) — the standard architecture with three-channel split, beer-range product detail, alcohol-compliance handling, credentialing panel and schema. Larger breweries with multiple taproom sites or breweries with separate cidery / distillery operations move to Pro (£1,499) for the multi-brand architecture. Launch tier (£499) rarely fits a serious microbrewery — the three-channel architecture and the alcohol-compliance requirements push past the single-scroll architecture.