Cibolo Creek Brewing Co.

Cibolo Creek Brewing Co. is a family-owned brewpub on South Main Street in Boerne, TX. It brews its own beer, serves a pub menu built on food from nearby farms, and hosts events and live music indoors and in its beer garden.

In early 2017 the brewery's web presence was a Squarespace page and a Facebook account. We planned and built a new WordPress site with an online store, set up email for the owners, and launched it on July 3, 2017, ahead of the brewery's first anniversary.

The owners wanted a site that felt like the pub: casual, local and serious about its beer. They wrote the content themselves and had a photographer shooting the pub, the food and the family, so the site had to show off those photos and be easy for them to keep current without us.

A lot of what they wanted to publish changes often. Food menus change with the seasons, the beer list changes, and a small-batch brew comes off the one-barrel system about every two weeks. They also wanted an events calendar, a newsletter, a shop for hats, shirts and pint glasses, and working email addresses on their own domain.

A site built on a brewery theme

We started from a purchased WordPress theme made for breweries and did all changes in a child theme, so updates to the theme would not wipe them out. We added the brewery's logo, colors and photos, set up a rotating hero on the home page, and put the address, a map and opening hours side by side. The layout was checked and adjusted on phones as well as desktop.

Pages the owners can edit

Every page runs from the WordPress admin. Current Beers lists each beer with its grains, hops, yeast and category, and has sections for the small batch on tap and the ones coming next. The lunch, dinner and brunch menus are regular text pages, not PDFs, so the owners can change a dish in a minute. Brewing Philosophy and Food Sourcing tell the story behind the beer and the food, with photo galleries and a list of the farms they buy from. An events calendar lists upcoming events with the date, time, description, photo and an optional price.

Online store

We set up WooCommerce for merchandise, with size choices for shirts. Because the brewery also sells in the pub, we set up a simple in stock or out of stock switch instead of inventory counts. Checkout runs through the brewery's own Square account. We placed, cancelled and refunded a test order from the WordPress admin before opening the shop.

Newsletter, contact and email

A newsletter signup sits in the footer of every page and on its own page. Signups are saved in WordPress and passed to the brewery's Mailchimp list, which confirms each address before adding it. The contact page has a map and a form that goes to the owners. We set up Google Workspace (then G Suite) email for the owners and staff, updated the domain's mail records, and handed the owners admin control.

Launch

We built and reviewed everything on a staging site that deployed automatically from version control. At launch we moved the site to the brewery's own hosting, switched DNS, and made HTTPS the default with permanent redirects from the old addresses. Google Analytics was in place from day one.

• The new site launched on July 3, 2017, and the shop started taking Square payments in mid-July.
• Menus, beers, events and products are all edited by the brewery's own team.
• Newsletter signups flow into Mailchimp from every page of the site.
• The site still runs on the child theme we built in 2017.

"The Caffeine team knocked it out of the park for us. Our website is the perfect representation of our business. In addition, they were more than helpful and incredibly responsive to our desires, questions and concerns. We now have the best restaurant website in town!"

Josh Mazour, Cibolo Creek Brewing Co.