It stands to reason that the place with Durango’s best selection of beers on tap also has the best collection of tap handles.
Delineating the 38 different beers on tap at Lady Falconburgh’s (as of Monday) and hanging from the ceiling, are hundreds of different tap handles, creating a gallery of sorts, and it’s clear which breweries put time, creativity and energy into their tap handles, which range from generic and run-of-the-mill to elaborate, some incorporating chains, animals and tubes of hops.
“Some of the beers they don’t even make anymore,” said Lady Falc’s owner Miguel Ramos, who bought the establishment a year and half ago. “I was like, ‘Sweet! I don’t know what to do with (them) but it looks cool.’”
Ramos said every new beer they pour comes with a new tap handle. And while the handles technically belong to the breweries, they don’t seem eager to get them back.
While Alaskan Brewing Co. is the most consistent brewery in terms of elaborate handles with its 3-dimensional animals, Ramos said the trends are changing. Instead of each beer having its own distinct handle, one new approach is for each brewery to have the same handle equipped with different stickers to differentiate each beer. Other breweries like New Belgium now send the same tap handle but with interchangeable tops for different beers.
If these trends hold and the emphasis on elaborately impressive tap handles goes away, Laday Falc’s might just have a museum collection on its hands.
David Holub
