Green Mountain Taps

American Made Tap Handles

Getting a Handle on Tap Handles

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Tom Bedell of The Commons writes about Jason Gardner in “Getting a Handle on Tap Handles.”

Plus: the Beer Naked truth, drinking, and driving (a golf ball)

By Tom Bedell/Special to The Commons

WILLIAMSVILLE—Steam was coming out of his ears the first time I saw Shaun Hill of Hill Farmstead Brewery fame.

It was toward the close of the first Brattleboro Brewers Festival in 2010, his first year of operation. Hill was in angry pursuit and capture of two wobbly festival-goers who had purloined tap handles from the Hill Farmstead booth for what they thought would be nifty souvenirs.

Hill left the perpetrators with a tongue-lashing that surely helped them remember the day, and maybe for that reason he has never returned to subsequent Brattleboro festivals.

Well, who can blame him?

The cost of a single tap handle can range from $16 to $25, said Jason Gardner, who should know.

The founder of Green Mountain Taps in Hinsdale, N.H., Gardner and his company have been churning out tap handles for breweries in New England and around the country for 20 years.

In addition to the company’s work for local and Vermont clients — like Whetstone Station, Hermit Thrush, von Trapp, 14th Star, Simple Roots, Lost Nation, and Zero Gravity — GMT has long created the tap handles for Allagash of Maine, Founders of Michigan, and upwards of 200 other breweries.

After graduating from Paul Smith’s College in New York, Gardner worked at McNeill’s Brewery for a few years, becoming Ray McNeill’s first assistant brewer.

After that he sold ads for a while for the brewspaper Yankee Brew News. During that stint, McNeill asked Gardner, also a woodworker and cabinetmaker, to fashion some tap handles for the brewery.

He then used $35 to get some business cards printed up at Lotus Graphics (“Tap Handles by Jason Gardner”), handing them out while on the road selling ads.

“It just grew from there,” said Gardner.

Photo 1

Tom Bedell/The Commons photo of Jason Gardner, Green Mountain Taps.

He leased some space to make the handles from the shop in Williamsville where he also built kitchen cabinets, until he realized he could more economically move the whole operation to his parents’ basement in Guilford.

Eventually, he took over their barn as well, and in 2006 he purchased the abandoned Gratton & Weeks paper mill in Hinsdale.

Gardner now employs from 25 to 36 full- and part-time employees, making signage, bottle openers and other products for breweries and other clients. But tap handles is the main business — about a $2 million business at that, growing about 20 percent a year.

“We’ve grown with the [brewing] industry,” said Gardner. “There are only about four tap-handle makers in the U.S. that really matter. Of that, we’re probably number four, honestly. But we’re 100-percent U.S. made, with a full in-house design service and fast turnaround.

“We’ve done it all with little advertising — some ads in brewspapers, our website, one trade show a year — and 20 years of what I would like to believe is an extremely good reputation.”

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Tom Bedell has more on beer (and golf) at his website, www.tombedell.com.