Tap dance: The art of getting a beer noticed

Yet even Anheuser-Busch, the maker of the country’s best-selling brand, Bud Light, has created quirky handles for its line of seasonal craft beers that include Beach Bum Blonde Ale and Jack’s Pumpkin Spice Ale. Jack’s features a large scarecrow with a pumpkin for a head.

“We know there is a lot of clutter in the draft market and a lot of taps,” said Pat McGauley, vice president of innovation at Anheuser-Busch. “It’s really important to have your tap stand out.”

Breweriana collector George Baley, who wrote the book “Vintage Beer Tap Markers: Ball Knobs, 1930s-1950s,” estimated that there are between 25,000 and 40,000 different handles.

Experts aren’t sure what the future holds for tap handle innovation. The handles can’t get much bigger or wider since they have to fit into a confined space.

Kathleen Kelly, a marketing professor and director of the Center of Business Ethics and Social Issues at Colorado State University, said tap handles are a good way to promote a brand, especially for niche marketers, and probably cheaper than mass media advertising.

Brewers also have started to focus more on on-premise sales at bars and restaurants because they have been losing out to wine and liquor, said Eric Shepard, executive editor of Beer Marketer’s Insights, a trade publication that covers the industry. Tap handles are a natural way to attract drinkers, just as posters and signs are, he said.

There’s no way to quantify whether the handles really help drive sales, Shepard said.

“I think you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a correlation but it does help the romance of the product so why not do it,” he said.

Several brewers, though, insist it helps.

Draft sales at Stevens Point Brewery in Stevens Point, Wis., jumped nearly 24 percent after it changed the type of kegs it used and turned the brewery’s mascot — a pointy headed gnomish fellow — into an oversized tap handle. Brewery officials say the new handle helped sales — though they can’t say by how much — and customer reaction was positive.

When White Marsh Brewing Co. in suburban Baltimore started in 1997, brewmaster Mike McDonald decided to use a cow’s head as a tap handle for his Daily Crisis IPA. Customers started ordering a beer by pointing to the cow. The handle became so popular that customers started mooing for their beer, he said.

White Marsh has since retired the cow tap handle.

Not all beer drinkers, though, are taken in by tap handles.

“It’s the coldness and the cost. I could care less about the handle,” Tonya Vance, 42, of Columbus said at the Winking Lizard Tavern.

Baley, the collector, agreed — to a degree.

“It probably helps the first time that you drink the beer because you wouldn’t have tried it,” he said. “But if you are a connoisseur of beer, you’re going to find one that you like and it isn’t going to matter if there’s a funny picture or character on the handle.”

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