Collector Club Member Spotlight #1: Isaac and Isabelle

Welcome to my first Amazing Tap Handles Collectors Club Member Spotlight post. Here I let club members share their "origin story" about how they got into tap handle collecting. First up are Isaac and Isabelle...click through to read more about their collecting experience, in their own words, and to see photos of their collection...

"Hello everyone. My wife’s name is Isabelle, my name is Isaac, and we are tap handle collectors. Our modest collection started approximately 3 to 4 years ago and really took off after we discovered the Amazing Tap Handle (ATH) web site and became a part of the ATH collectors club (ATHCC). Here is a small capsule of how we began collecting and how it grew to where it is today.

So Isabelle and I were sitting in the room we call the bar room at the summer retreat house on the Jersey Shore. There was a small bar counter there and it was stocked with various liquors on its shelves. This was not a wet bar by any means – just a room where the bar was along with 2 stools and a love seat. Isabelle and I were sitting in there one evening, she with a glass of wine and myself with a bottle of beer I had just brought in from the kitchen refrigerator. The question arose as to how we might decorate the room. Around and around we went as we kept brainstorming ideas. One of the ideas we came up with was beer tap handles since we call this room “The Bar Room”. Shortly after that we shut the house down for the winter and didn’t think too much about it.

In the spring we opened the house back up and went about our normal activities; however, once in a while, beer taps would enter into the conversation. We had seen a few different taps in antique stores and flea markets we had been to and often commented about them. One day, we visited a shop that contained many independent shops inside of it. We saw one shop that was selling breweriana items and had 20 or 30 taps for sale – all were non-figurals. Although we didn’t purchase any, we certainly did talk more often about beer taps for the next couple of months as the decor for the bar room.

Finally, our minds made up, we went back to the store. To our surprise, approx ½ of the beer tap stock had been replenished with different taps. How cool was this, we thought, a place that sells taps and replenishes inventory as needed – a constant supply. It was at that time that we saw not only wooden, ceramic and lucite tap handles but also figural tap handles. WOW!!! Look at those figurals. We had not seen these before! We purchased 3 or 4 tap handles that day, including a couple of figurals. There were others but they had dings, chips and other damages so we passed on them. The following few weeks we went back to the store every weekend and purchased a few more each time. Then we got smart.

Our bar room "décor" was turning into a small collection with taps from all over the country. We needed to take a breath and decide what direction we wanted to go with the collection before we got any deeper. At first, since the summer house was in New Jersey and we lived the winters in Pennsylvania, we decided to zero in on beers from those 2 states. That didn’t last long at all as we found ourselves purchasing taps that did not meet our defined criteria but looked really great – primarily figurals. Approximately a month or so into our collecting and just on a hunch, we decided to see if any tap handles were available on eBay. To our total amazement, there were thousands of them. We thought we had seen some nice looking figurals in the store but once we browsed eBay and saw what was really available, WOW!!!!

Very quickly we decided to drop the New Jersey and Pennsylvania criteria and just look for figurals. That was OK but then we started collecting the smaller lucite taps as well. Our thinking was that we would have a greater variety of brewery names in our collection without the higher cost of all figurals. Skip forward another couple of weeks and then we decided to go after the nautical themed tap handles since we were at the Jersey Shore and that is where we would keep the collection.

From that day forward, our interest has been primarily on nautical themed taps and occasionally an older style lucite will be added. Sometimes we still do purchase a miscellaneous figural tap that just really appeals to us.

Around the same time, we got to thinking – we had never thought about a beer tap collection, but wondered if there was any beer tap collecting clubs anywhere. We found all types of breweriana shows, exhibits, etc., but in reading through their publications, we saw no mention of tap handle clubs nor did anyone we talked to know of any tap handle collectors specific club. After searching on the internet, we came across the ATH web site.

WOW!!!!! Talk about some great looking figural tap handles. I saw hundreds of taps that I had never seen. Unknown to us at the time, it was because they were older taps and no longer produced. After further investigation, we found out how rare and/or valuable some of the taps can be.

As we were initially purchasing tap handles for the bar room, we thought that $25 or $30 for a used figural tap was “the” price rage for taps in used but pretty good condition. Then we saw some common style new ones on eBay in the $60 / $75 price range. Holy cow, we thought, do folks really pay that much for a beer tap handle???? Our heads really spun when we saw older and rarer tap handles selling for several hundred dollars on eBay – and some of them were pretty beat up!!!

It didn’t take long after seeing the real tap market on eBay and browsing the ATH site to realize, we were hooked!!! It wasn’t too long after that when we saw a collector’s club was being started by the person behind the ATH site, and we joined. What a great decision that was.

What a way to meet other tap handle collectors and share your own collecting experiences with. Numerous members have been collecting tap handles for decades and have a wealth of knowledge to assist the newer collectors. We also sometimes trade and/or swap taps among ourselves. I’m glad we found the ATH site and even more so, glad we joined the ATHCC.

Our collection does have a group of very special figurals that are reminders of ourselves as well as our parents. For example, we both had a career with a major communications company, hence we have the “Goose Island” telephone receiver tap in our collection. Isabelle likes hummingbirds; hence we have the Humboldt 3-D hummingbird tap. Isabelle is a real angel to me, so we have an Angel City tap. Isabelle’s dad liked to fish, so we have the Madison River catch and release tap. Mom was from Kentucky, so we have a Kentucky horse head tap. My dad loved to work with wood as a hobby and built his entire retirement house from the ground up, so we have a Melvin 2x4. Mom liked to decorate with a country rooster theme in the kitchen and dining room, hence we have a Tallgrass Velvet Rooster. We actually have multiple taps for each of the family members above, but you get the idea behind our special figurals collection.

Also, in our collection are 4 mini collections from 4 specific breweries – each collection having 13 taps from one of the 4 breweries. The mini collections are from Schmidts, Schlitz, Ballantine and National Bohemian. The first 3 breweries were selected simply because these were common beers in our area since we were kids. Natty Boh was selected as my uncle (actually Dad’s uncle), was a big part of their executive team when the brewery was located in Baltimore. This collection is in loving memory of him.

I've talked about our special family taps and our nautical taps and the appeal they have for us. But we also have taps that don’t fit into the family or nautical groups, taps that have special appeal to us. Of the taps we currently have out on display, there are 3 that jump out at us. We were very excited to add them to our collection. They are, in no particular order, the Gordon Birsch Blond Bock guy drinking from the barrel, the Big Daddy's Backyard Brew and the Brewski Bar Room Ale.

The Big Daddy's Backyard Brew was a very interesting find and upon doing some investigation, we found that this tap handle is very rare and scarce. We have never seen another one. There was only 1 production run of this tap handle. That run consisted of just 30 of these custom tap handles being manufactured in 2001 for the “Big Daddy's BBQ Sauce & Spicesto” which had various locations across the U.S.A. They were all hand painted and are made of polyester resin. Big Daddy’s Backyard Brew Amber Ale is brewed by Full Sail Brewing Co located in Hood River, Oregon. Full Sail has been producing the Amber Ale for Big Daddy’s since the mid-80’s, and Big Daddy’s is one of their larger accounts. Full Sail will occasionally order custom taps handles for some of their larger accounts and this was one of them.

Similarly, the Brewski Bar Room Ale tap is rare and scarce also. We acquired this one from a woman in California. She told us her now deceased husband worked at Brewski's before they closed in that area and he had brought home one of the taps to use on his refrigerator keg in the basement of their home. Although she couldn't quite remember, she believes she recalls her husband telling her that there were only 50 or 100 of these taps produced.

The Gordon Birsch Blond Bock guy drinking from the barrel is just a really funny tap handle. Although you would never see this in real life, I'm sure many a serious beer drinker has thought about and envisioned themselves thinking "a glass of beer isn't enough to drink - give me a pint - no give me a quart - no give me a growler - oh heck, just give the whole darn keg". Obviously, the designer of this tap handle was one of those serious beer drinkers - a pretty funny and whimsical tap handle.

Currently, we have close to 400 taps on display in our bar room, with many more in boxes, not yet out on display. There is plenty of wall space for many more but so far, Isabelle has declared the wall space off limits for tap handles.

We currently have several taps in our collection that we thought we might never own. They are fairly rare to very rare but more importantly they must be very well liked by those folks who currently own them since you very, very seldom see them for sale. Currently, most of them are not yet on display, but they certainly will be soon.

At any rate, one such tap, which was the first one we acquired that we never thought we would own, is the Coronado Mermaid Red tap handle. It's a very colorful and beautiful tap, is absolutely one of our more prestigious nautical taps, and was one of our collecting high points when we acquired it.

The real sweet part about obtaining this rare tap is that it came from a fellow collector in our ATHCC club. Knowing our deep interest in the nautical taps, it was offered to us at a very reasonable and realistic price – not one that was 5 times its value like you sometimes see online at places like eBay. Collectors helping collectors – we love it and you simply can’t beat it!!!

The Bar Room has turned into major place of conversation. Anytime we take someone into that room, the conversation just flows about the taps and our collection in general. Also hanging in the Bar Room are a dozen and a half or so pen and ink drawings I drew many years ago. I never had any official art training but really enjoyed making these drawings. Most of them were drawn after a long day of training on the football field and before I started my full-time evening/night job.

Beer tap handles has become one of our passions and with many thanks to the ATH site and the members of the ATHCC, our knowledge base has increased a hundred-fold."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My thanks to Isaac and Isabelle for being the first brave souls to share their tap collecting story! Hopefully I'll have some other club member stories to share with you in the future...