Four Years Later, "Made in America" Still Isn't Struggling

In April 2022, I sat down with Fox and Friends to talk about something that was, at the time, the only thing anyone in business wanted to discuss: the supply chain.

Ports were backed up. Containers were stuck. Lead times that used to be six weeks had stretched to six months, and nobody could tell you why or when it would end. The segment was titled "'Made in America' businesses don't struggle with supply chain issues," and I said what I still believe: when you build it here, you are not waiting on a boat.

Four years later, that clip has aged well.

What the disruption actually taught the beer industry

Breweries learned something expensive between 2021 and 2023. The cheapest quote is not the real price.

An imported tap handle that costs a few dollars less per unit stops being a bargain the moment your seasonal launches and the handles are sitting in a container off the coast. You cannot put a discount on a tap wall. The handle either shows up before the beer does or the whole marketing spend was wasted. Brewers who got burned on that math stopped shopping on unit cost alone and started shopping on certainty.

That is the part people miss about domestic manufacturing. It is not patriotism as a sales pitch. It is risk removal.

What "we make it here" actually means at our shop

When we say American made, we mean the whole operation, not a final assembly step with a sticker on it.

Every tap handle we ship is cast, cut, printed, painted, cleared and packed in our Birmingham, Alabama shop. Our designers concept the shape. Our crew builds it. Our people answer the phone. There is no overseas broker in the middle, no time zone gap, no six week email chain to find out where your order is.

That structure is why we could keep quoting real lead times through the worst of it while importers were quoting hope. Nothing was in transit from another hemisphere, because nothing needed to be.

It also changes what is possible on a rush. A brewery calling us in a panic because a distributor moved a launch date is talking to the person who can actually walk to the floor and ask. That conversation does not exist when your manufacturer is a sales office in front of a factory eight thousand miles away.

The tariff era made the same point louder

The 2022 conversation was about ports and containers. The 2026 conversation is about tariffs, trade policy and cost volatility, and the analysis keeps landing in the same place: importers are absorbing a moving target, and domestic producers are not.

Industry coverage this year has been consistent about a rebuild cycle in American manufacturing driven by exactly this, with reshoring activity and domestic capacity investment continuing to climb. We are not going to pretend we predicted trade policy. We just never built a business that depended on it going a particular way.

If you are a brewery or a distributor budgeting for next year's handles, that is the practical difference. A domestic quote is a number. An import quote is a number plus whatever happens between now and delivery.

What this looks like when you order from us

Our process has not changed since that segment aired, because it did not need to.

You pick a handle. You upload your art. We send you a mockup before anything hits production, and nothing gets built until you approve it. If you want a fully sculpted custom shape, our designers concept it with you first.

We build in resin for full color, full wrap artwork that reads across a crowded bar. We build in wood when you want the hand finished taproom look. We build in metal with magnetic swap out faces, so a rotating tap list stops meaning a new handle every time. And we build fully custom tap handles when the shape itself is the idea.

All of it in Birmingham. All of it by people whose names you can learn.

The point

A tap handle is the only piece of marketing that sits at the exact moment of decision. Eye level, arm's reach, right when someone is choosing their next pour. It is worth building well, and it is worth being able to get.

Four years ago I said Made in America businesses do not struggle with supply chain issues. I would say it again today, with more evidence behind it.

If you want handles from a shop that answers the phone, request a quote or browse what we build. We will tell you straight what fits your brand and your budget. Call us at 205-224-0829.

Brad Lugar is the founder of Steel City Tap Co. in Birmingham, Alabama. Watch the original Fox and Friends segment here.