Tap Handle #668: Harvest Moon

November 09, 2017

Tap Handle #668: Harvest Moon - Pigs Ass Porter

Tap size: 10"
Rarity: less than 10 seen, hand-made
Mounting: 3/8" ferrule on 5/16" anchor bolt

Harvest Moon's Pigs Ass Porter is a perfect example of how to make humor work in a tap handle design. Featuring a pig in a top hat and coattails standing at a bar with a foaming mug of beer - and wearing no pants - the tap brings a smile to the face of everyone who sees it. The brewery's name appears below the pig, while a ribbon below that displays the name of the beer. Both the brewery name and beer name appear on the backside of the tap as well. Speaking of the backside, which is flat, the tap is signed and dated. I can't quite make out the date...it looks like maybe 2001 or 2002. This tap is still in use despite its age, but over the years only a handful have made their way to the secondary market, where they sell for over $100 or even twice that much.

Click through to read more about Harvest Moon Brewing, their Pigs Ass Porter, and to see more photos of this overexposed tap...

Harvest Moon Brewing was founded in Belt, Montana in 1996 by Stan Guedesse, Tim Peterson, Jim Page, and John Ballantyne. Guedesse grew up in Belt and had worked for General Mills as a machine operator. A coworker got him interested in trying home brewing when he lived in California. After he transferred back to Belt, Montana, Guedesse and his wife Valerie opened a home brew supply shop in nearby Great Falls in 1995. Peterson and Page, both architects and customers of the home brew shop, won a Small Business Administration award for writing a business plan on how to run a microbrewery. Guedesse was on board with the plan but they had to wait for a few years to save up capital. Environmental engineer Ballantyne joined the team after selling them some old dairy tanks. The four partners planned, experimented and learned for almost three years and spent more than $100,000 on their first set of stainless tanks and other equipment.

During the first few years after he quit his regular job, Guedesse relied on his wife’s paycheck to get by. The partners chose to start brewing operations in Belt, in the back of the Belt Brew Pub in 1996. They had originally planned to locate their brewery in Great Falls, but higher property costs forced them to choose Belt instead, where Guedesse already lived, and they also felt that Belt's central location to several big cities nearby would be advantageous. More importantly, Belt’s water supply comes from the Madison aquifer, also the source for world-class springs in Great Falls and Lewistown. Because of this water’s purity, the municipal supply system in Belt is not chlorinated or treated as most other city water supply systems. Pumped directly from the aquifer, the water is available to use straight from the tap without treatment or filtering. Their barley is grown and malted just a few miles from the brewery, while their malted wheat and hops come from the Northwest.

The brewery’s first beers were ready for consumption in early 1997. By choosing a remote site in a small town, Harvest Moon knew they were giving up the opportunity for high-profit sales in the taproom, but that didn't seem to hurt profitability at all, with the brewery experiencing 30% growth after startup. Great Falls was their main market, but as a "blue collar town” that was used to Rainier and Pabst, it took time for Great Falls beer drinkers to convert over to microbrews. In addition, it was hard for the brewery to find a company willing to distribute their beer initially, so they would send out their own driver with a full truck west of the Continental Divide one day and send the same driver in another direction a few days later. However, once their taps got in to bars and demand began to increase, distributors started to take interest.

By 1999, Harvest Moon had outgrown its location at Belt Brew Pub, and they moved to a former Cenex station. Still experiencing 30-40% growth each year, they expanded the building in 2006 and added a bottling line. They also brought back a local favorite to help Moon penetrate the Great Falls market, purchasing the rights to the name, “Great Falls Select,” which was a popular lager brewed by a now-closed local brewery until the late 1960s. In 2008 sales began to slow, which the brewery attributed to increased competition from other microbreweries rather than the recession. In 2009 they began canning their popular Beltian White, which made up 60% of their sales, in order to target the fishing and camping market. Their early decision to bottle and can their beers helped boost long-distance sales because distributors wanted both keg beer for bars and packaged beers for grocery stores and restaurants.

The slowdown proved to be temporary, and by 2012 Harvest Moon had reached capacity with its existing equipment at about 7,200 barrels a year. The company had purchased and pieced together a bigger, quicker brew house system, but held off using it initially because demand wasn’t growing as fast as expected, and production actually dropped back to about 6,000 barrels a year. Activating the larger system would increase their capacity to 90 barrels a day. In 2015 they launched smaller, 15-barrel fermenting and conditioning tanks to make more seasonal and experimental beers. Harvest Moon has made a variety of beers, but in recent years focused on a few favorites, including Beltian White, Great Falls Select, Loch & Lode Scotch, Elevator IPA, Charlie Russell Red and Pigs Ass Porter. Today Harvest Moon beer is distributed throughout Montana as well as in Wyoming, North Dakota, Chicago and Wisconsin.

Pigs Ass Porter is an award-winning dark ale which is an original London style, lighter in body than a stout but with the same alcohol content. It is brewed with pale, crystal, chocolate and black malts to create a creamy, smooth, roasted, slightly chocolate tasting ale with a bit of hoppiness in the finish. The name comes from the fact that after brewing, the mash is given to a local farmer and there can't be anything better than spent grain from brewing for fattening up a pig.