
#Harpoon ipa draft handle how to
Now, how to make one that stands apart from the crowd? The simplest, lamest, craft-beer-needs-more-women-in-decision-making-capacities-provingest route to making your brewery’s handle rise above the rest is to make it rise above the rest.

Boston Beer Company has television ads, and Lagunitas sponsors “This American Life,” but for the most part craft brewers try to get by without spending money on media. But even if some breweries don’t think tap-handle design is fun, they all know it beats buying advertising. Some who embrace the aesthetic side of the game may relish these tasks, but it can be a chore for those who don’t enjoy adding “arts and” to the craft beer life. This, of course, requires breweries to design, manufacture, and distribute distinctive tap handles.

Even if the menu is meticulously updated (and it’s not), who’s got the discipline to read for 15 minutes before her first sip of beer? Sure, you could just ask for “Whichever Bastard you got, they’re all the same to me,” but a safer strategy is to quickly scan the tap handles for a brewery you like and then ask your bartender which specific beer’s in the barrel. This can make a trip to your friendly neighborhood 100-draft beer bar as confusing as it is delicious. Among its portfolio of at least five dozen beers, Samuel Adams sells 10 different winter seasonals, plus five IPAs with “Rebel” in the name Stone offers eight Arrogant Bastard variants. And it can be conservatively estimated that if we have 4,000-plus breweries, then there are upwards of 40,000 distinct beers on the market at any given time.

There are more than 4,000 craft breweries operating in America, more than at any other time in our gloriously tipsy history.
