Tap Handle #186: Bottle Tree Blonde

This is an awesome tap...I knew I had to have it the first moment I saw it. All the little blue bottles, the sign, and barbed wire, add great touches to the detail. A fantastic and rare tap. On the right you'll find some conceptual artwork that taphandles.com created when designing it.

Bottle Tree was founded in Tryon, North Carolina in 2009 by Fred Block. Block, a controls engineer for General Electric in Greenville, had been researching thermodynamics in 2003 when he got hooked by home brewing. Six years later he was forming Bottle Tree. Rejected by banks and other breweries, Fred risked his personal life savings to make it happen. He had no idea how his beer would be brewed until a chance meeting with the owners of Thomas Creek at an Oktoberfest celebration. Thomas Creek, a huge contract brewer in South Carolina, agreed to brew his beer under contract.

The brewery's name comes from an old legend, in which bottles hung on tree branches trap evil spirits at night, and dawn’s first light destroys them. The idea dates back a few thousand years, and is believed to have originated in the Middle East, then passed on to Africa, and eventually to Europe and the southern United States during the slave trade.Block stumbled upon his first bottle tree in 2002 while researching Southern folk art. At the time, he was looking for a symbol to represent his homebrewing hobby, and although the bottle was a natural parallel to his beer, he felt a deeper connection: It was less than a year since Sept. 11, when “people were looking for something good, and to ward off evil,” and the bottle tree was just that. Bottle Tree currently has two varieties: Belgian Blonde and Irish Imperial Red Ale, and is distributed across the south and the east coast.

Bottle Tree Blonde is a Belgian blonde ale with a blend of 4 malted grains, noble hops, and Belgian yeast. Recommended food pairings are shrimp, andouille sausage, gumbo, jambalaya, crayfish, crab, fish, alligator, collard greens, turnips, ham, pit BBQ, fried green tomatoes, and any spicy foods. Weighted average on ratebeer.com is 2.84 out of 5.

Bottle Tree Official Website