When I started collecting figural tap handles several years ago by picking up a Beer Wolf tap at a garage sale, I never could have imagined the the craft beer movement would explode with cool taps. I hit 100 midway through 2011. I hit 250 a year later and questioned whether or not I would go past 300. I'm currently sitting at 405, and there's more I want every day. I don't know how I'm going to display them all. But I did create a blog, sort of a "museum", to document the collection, share brewery history, and more. If you'd like to take a look, you can find the blog at beertaps.blogspot.com. Feel free to look around and give me some feedback...what's your favorite tap handle? If you know of other cool figural taps, please let me know...
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That's a great post. I'm fortunate to have some of the great taps listed like Jester King (awesome!) and Angry Orchard (which happens to be my most viewed blog entry). As far as I'm concerned, these taps are like works of art, and I appreciate the capital it takes for a brewery to invest in having them produced without knowing if it will pay off. It's sad when breweries go out of business and their great tap disappears from circulation...
Any Collectors of Tap Handles...I am starting to collect tap handles of breweries I have visited. Any thoughts?
Like what kind of thoughts? Yeah dude? You go girl? Buy them at the breweries, or on sites like eBay. I have handles for most of the kegs I've had at home and that's where I get them.
Ebay is the way to go, pretty expensive from the brewery in my experience. I don't go to the well too often but when I ask, the local place where I get kegs will often give them to me for free (I get kegs right at the distributor).
When I have something on tap it usually isn't a "one and done", it is a recurring choice. Most I buy, the majority of those are off of eBay, the balance from the breweries. A few have come from the store where I get my kegs, especially for new breweries / beers that haven't been around long enough to hit the secondary markets. When you are dropping $80 or $90 a keg over multiple kegs a $20 handle isn't so bad. And I do match handles for all my kegs.
