Tap Handles

When you really start thinking about this, tap handles are one of the most important things to a draft only brewery (good beer always helps). With draft only accounts, it is the main marketing presence in a bar. A good tap handle will bring the beer to people's attention and make them ask about it and hopefully order it. Making a good product is what brings them back. When you are at a bar, you aren't always sitting at the actual bar and take a look at the taps from afar to see what they have, the well designed ones are noticeable.

Problems I see with many common tap handles:
1) You can't read them. I always like to know what I am ordering and if I can't tell what it is then I wont order it, I will probably go to one of my mainstay beers instead of something new. Not all the brewery and beer information needs to be in word form to be identifiable. Too many taps have a novel written on them and you don't care about most of the information on them.
2) Shape, too many are a standard oval on top of a long wooden handle. I am aware that making tap handles is expensive and it is cheapest and easiest to go with a standard shape, but I think that tap handles are a worthwhile investment. Look at Goose Island, probably the easiest tap handle to recognize from anywhere in a bar, I am sure it is worth the extra cost to make those taps. Just being a different shape doesn't make it better though, there are plenty of weird looking tap handles that do nothing more than the standard tap shape.

Things I like in tap handles:
1) Easily identifiable logo at the very top, Avery is a good example of the logo on top, but I am not sure that I am a fan of the information below.
2) Consistency through the beer line up, Georgetown has a little more unique oval, but all the taps have the same basic shape.
3) You can easily tell the two most important things, Brewery, Beer Name. Beer style is included in that, but that has more to do with naming conventions that the brewery uses.

I will be giving a lot of thought to what the PBC tap handles will look like and will be getting some help from a marketing company because I know beer, they know marketing. I have a lot of different ideas floating around in my head and once some of those get sorted out I will try them out on the blog. To throw out a few, I have never seen carbon fiber taps and I love that look, maybe there is a cheap carbon fiber coating out there. Bright colors, but not obnoxious...well maybe obnoxious, it would stand out. I also like aluminum taps that are machined or water jetted into logos and shapes. Once I decide, this will be the first place to reveal them.