River City Drafthouse
Moody, craft-forward site for a Highlands taproom — a rotating 26-tap beer list, sushi menu, and happy hour.
River City Drafthouse is a demonstration build we designed and produced in-house to show our approach for this kind of business. The demo runs live, but it is not an operating business site: ordering, booking, and checkout flows are for show, and nothing placed through them is fulfilled.
A taproom's core product changes every week. Twenty-six taps rotate, kegs kick mid-shift, and seasonal pours come and go. Most bar sites go stale within a month because updating them means calling a developer. The brief for this concept: design a site moody enough to sell the room, and structured enough that the tap list stays accurate without anyone touching code.
We built the entire site around a structured tap list. Each pour is a data record with a style, brewery, ABV, and pour size, so the list can be reordered, retired, or replaced in minutes and the page re-renders itself. Around that system we set a dark, craft-forward art direction: heavy type, low light, and photography that feels like the right corner seat. A full sushi and bar-food menu, the happy hour schedule, and visit details round out the build.
The finished demonstration shows how a hospitality site can be atmospheric and operable at the same time. The hardest-working page, the tap list, becomes a five-minute edit instead of a developer ticket. The same structured-menu pattern carries directly to any bar, brewery, or restaurant whose offering changes faster than its website.
How We Built It.
Concept & Art Direction
Concept & Art Direction
Defined the mood first: a dark, wood-and-brass palette, editorial type, and photography direction that sells the room before the menu.
Tap List System
Tap List System
Modeled the 26-tap list as structured data with style, brewery, and ABV fields, so rotation is an edit rather than a rebuild.
Menus & Happy Hour
Menus & Happy Hour
Typeset the sushi and bar-food menus for fast scanning, and built the happy hour schedule around the week's actual rhythm.
Polish & Deploy
Polish & Deploy
Tuned motion, load performance, and mobile layouts, then deployed the demonstration build to its own live environment.
