Dry-erase markers, magnets, masking tape, stickers... Unless you brew the same beers over and over all homebrewers who keg eventually have to come up with a way to non-destructively label their tap handles.

A recent post on Onebeer.net, Erik Beer's excellent site, inspired me to unscrew the Sierra Nevada, Boddingtons and Strongbow commercial handles from my taps and make my own with interchangeable heads for various beer styles.

A bonus to the new handles is I could make them as short (or tall) as I wanted to.  No longer would I have to worry about opening the over-head freezer door and dumping beer.

The handles start with a trip to the local hardware store and a search for a decorative wooden dowel worthy of pouring beer. My local store had inexpensive wooden spindles or balusters in building supplies that were perfect and were quite similar to Erik's original design.  They were also a perfect diameter to fit More Beer's threaded brass tap handle insert.

A local art supply store had 1.5" "doll heads" that would become my interchangeable tap handle tops for about $.50 each.  I ended up with about 20 of them to cover all the styles I brew.

With the raw supplies purchases it was a simple matter to prepare and assemble the new handles:

• cut the spindles to size
• drill the bottom of the spindles to accept the threaded insert
• drill the top of the spindles and bottom of the balls to accept a 3/8" dowel
• glue the dowel into the spindle
• stain and finish both spindle and ball
• drink copiously

I then built a small rack to hold the unused tap handle balls out of left-over dowels and a strip of molding I had lying around.

It's a great way to deal with those tap handles that can change so frequently.  Kudos to Erik Beer for a killer project.

 How do you deal with your changing taps?