How to Build a Brewery Website Without Code in 2026
A brewery website without code starts as a paragraph: what you brew, where people drink it, and when the taproom is open. Zugo turns that description into a working site, boots it in a sandbox before handing it over, and publishes it to a live address. A simple site is one build plus a few edits.
This guide stays specific to breweries, because a brewery site is really three sites wearing one coat: a taproom page, a product catalogue that changes weekly, and a trade page for the bars and shops that stock you.
What does a brewery website actually need?
Five blocks cover most independents. A hero with the brewery name, the city, and whether the taproom is open today. A beer list with style, ABV, and a short tasting note per beer. Taproom details with hours, food arrangements, and whether dogs and children are welcome. An events block for tap takeovers and brewery tours. A trade section with a stockist enquiry route and a line about distribution.
The beer list is the part that dates fastest. A brewery with a rotating tap changes it weekly, so design the page around editing rather than around looking finished. Separate the core range, which changes rarely, from what is pouring now, which changes constantly.
The trade section is the block most breweries forget, and it is the one that pays. A bar manager looking for a new keg line wants a wholesale contact, a rough price band, and delivery area, and wants them without sending an email first.
What should the prompt say?
Zugo builds from a description, so the description has to carry what a designer would draw out of you in a briefing. This template holds the parts a brewery needs:
Build a website for a brewery and taproom in [city].
Sections:
1. Hero: brewery name, one line on what we brew,
today's taproom hours, button "What's pouring".
2. Beers: core range and current specials, each with
name, style, ABV, and a short tasting note.
3. Taproom: address, hours per day, food situation,
dogs/children policy, transport and parking.
4. Events: tours, tap takeovers, launches, with dates.
5. Trade: a short note for bars and shops, plus a
contact form for wholesale enquiries.
Tone: plain and confident, no craft-beer clichés.
Two lines are worth adding if they apply. "Keep 'what's pouring' as an easily editable list separate from the core range" saves you a rebuild every Thursday. "Add an allergen note field to each beer" matters more than most breweries expect.
If starting from a blank field feels harder than starting from something, Zugo ships 25 ready-made templates, and a hospitality or storefront starting point is closer to a brewery than an empty page. The templates guide covers choosing one.
Can you sell beer online from the site?
Technically yes, and legally it depends on where you are, which is the important half of the sentence. Alcohol sales are regulated by jurisdiction, payment providers apply their own rules to the category, and shipping alcohol across a border is a different question again. Check your local rules and your payment provider's terms before you build the shop.
| What you want to sell | What you connect | The honest caveat |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing online, taproom only | Nothing | The simplest site, and the right answer for many small breweries |
| Merch: glassware, shirts, gift cards | Stripe for one-off payments | No alcohol regulation involved, so this is the easy starting point |
| Beer for local collection | Stripe, plus a clear collection-only note | Removes shipping questions, keeps age checks in person |
| Beer shipped to customers | Stripe, plus compliance work that is yours | Age verification, permitted destinations, and courier rules are legal matters, not features |
| A beer subscription | Stripe subscriptions | Same compliance questions, repeated monthly |
The age gate deserves a plain statement: an age confirmation screen is a courtesy notice, not a verification system. It asks a question and takes the answer on trust. If your jurisdiction requires real age verification at purchase or delivery, that is a compliance process involving your courier and your payment setup, and no website popup satisfies it.
How do you keep the tap list current without a rebuild?
Ask for the pouring list as a table with editable rows, then change it with plain-text edits: "replace the current specials with these four, keep the core range as it is." An edit costs 3 credits, so a weekly update is a small, predictable cost and takes about as long as writing a chalkboard.
The habit that keeps the site trusted is deleting rather than accumulating. A tap list showing a beer that ran out in June makes every other line on the page suspect, and a visitor who drives across town for a beer you no longer have does not come back for the second attempt.
One real limit: the page states what you tell it, it does not read your tanks. A live list driven by actual stock means a database behind the site, which Zugo can build with Supabase, but that is a project with a daily habit attached rather than a prompt.
What does it cost to build and keep online?
Zugo bills in credits per action. A site build costs 6 credits. An edit costs 3, which is the number that matters for a brewery, since the site changes weekly by design. A multi-page platform costs 12 credits plus 3 for each page past the first three, and that is the bracket you reach with accounts and a real shop.
The Free plan gives 5 credits, enough to look around, and one build costs 6, so a working brewery site starts on Pro at $25 per month with 200 credits. Business is $99 per month. Hosting for the published site is included. Hi-Fi mode, which spends more effort on the visual pass, doubles both prices.
The comparison that matters is not against an agency invoice. It is against the two years many small breweries spend posting tap updates only to social platforms, where the post disappears in a day and the search engine never sees it.
How do you publish it on your own domain?
Publishing is one action and the site goes live at an address like yourbrewery.zugo.run. Connect your own domain before it goes on a can, a pump clip, or a delivery note, because that address will outlive several redesigns. The custom domain guide walks through the DNS records.
Add Google Analytics at the same time. For a brewery the useful signal is narrow: how many people check the taproom hours on a Friday afternoon, and how many open the trade page. The second number tells you whether the wholesale section is doing any work at all.
If you outgrow the builder, GitHub export hands you the actual repository. The project is yours, so a developer you hire later starts from working code. Breweries change hands and change agencies more often than they change addresses, and owning the files is what keeps that cheap.
How do you know the build is not broken?
Zugo boots every build in a sandbox before showing it to you, and a build that failed to load is reported as a failure rather than handed over as a blank page. That lowers the risk of publishing something obviously broken, and it does not replace your own checking, because "the page rendered" and "the ABV figures are right" are different claims.
Check four things by hand. Every ABV and allergen note, against your own records, since those are the two numbers where being wrong is a real problem. The taproom hours, including the day you close early. The trade enquiry form, submitted with your own address. The map link, on a phone, from the road outside.
Do the last one on mobile data while standing in the car park, because that is exactly how a visitor will use the page. A site that behaves well on a laptop and slowly on a phone at the edge of an industrial estate is a site that loses the visit it was built for.
Where does an AI builder stop for a brewery?
Three limits worth knowing before you start.
Compliance is not a feature. Licensing, age verification, labelling rules, and shipping restrictions are legal obligations that sit with you. The site can display your policies clearly; it cannot make a sale lawful.
Untappd, EPOS, and distributor feeds are developer work. Pulling live ratings, syncing till data, or importing a wholesaler's catalogue are integrations with their own authentication, and there is no connector for them.
Photography is still yours. The builder writes layout and copy. A brewery page is judged on how the taproom and the cans look, and no generator supplies those images.
Everything else fits in an evening: a fast, honest site with real hours, a current tap list, and a trade route that works, edited in plain text whenever the tank empties. If food is a bigger part of your business than beer, the companion guide on building a food truck site covers the moving-location version of the same problem, and the bakery site guide covers daily-changing stock. When you are ready, start at zugo.dev and describe your brewery in a paragraph.