Modular Tap Handles: How Avery Brewing Runs One Body for Every Beer

Updated September 2026 by Brad Lugar

Quick answer: Steel City Tap Co. built a modular resin tap handle system for Avery Brewing Co. in Boulder, Colorado. One body carries the brewery's mark permanently. Each beer gets its own sculpted, hand-painted topper that seats into the face of that body. Avery IPA runs a hop cone. White Rascal runs the character. Same body underneath both. The part nobody asks about, and the part we spent a year on, was weight.

Modular does not have to mean generic

Most breweries treat this as a two-option question. Build a handle for every beer, or build one handle for the whole lineup.

There is a third answer, and for a brewery with a deep portfolio it is usually the right one. Build one body and make the distinctive part swappable.

The reason breweries talk themselves out of it is that they picture a sticker. A shared body with a printed panel is the cheap version of this idea, and it does read generic. So the assumption goes: a platform handle is the safe boring choice, and if you want something people notice you have to commit to one sculpt for one beer.

Look at the hop cone and then tell me that is the boring choice.

That is the whole trick. The part that changes is not artwork on a panel. It is a sculpt, painted by hand, that seats into the body. You get the thing that stops somebody at ten feet and you keep the ability to change beers without buying handles.

So the tradeoff everybody assumes they are making is not real. What is real is cost. A sculpted topper is not a printed insert, and you pay for a sculpt every time you add a beer. The savings are in the body, the tooling and the inventory, not in the art.

The window is the product

Look at the blank. The brewery's mark sits at the base and never moves. The face is an empty recess. That recess is the entire idea.

What it buys you is the thing every brewery with a rotating list complains about. A seasonal costs a topper instead of a handle. A beer that gets renamed costs a topper. A beer that dies after one summer does not leave you holding a pallet you cannot use. And the account never sees a mismatched wall, because every handle in the building is the same silhouette in the same finish.

A swap system lives or dies on the fit

The seam is the product. If the topper sits loose it rattles on every pull and the handle reads as broken. If it sits too tight, the first person who tries to change it snaps something, and a swap system nobody can swap is just an expensive handle.

Then look at what this particular sculpt does. It does not sit politely inside the recess. The horns and the hair come up over the lip of the body and break the outline. That is deliberate and it is the difference between a picture set into a frame and a character climbing out of one.

It is also the hard version of the problem. A flat panel only has to fit. A sculpt that overhangs has to fit, sit at the right depth, and land in the right rotation, or the whole thing looks crooked from across the room.

That tolerance took six revisions of the cut file in a single day to land. Not six weeks. Six versions, same afternoon, because the only way to find the right fit is to cut it, seat it, and feel it.

Three surfaces, three jobs

Most tap handles have one good side. Turn them around and there is nothing there, or the same logo again at half the quality.

This one is doing different work on every surface it has, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

The face you see from the room is the sculpt. That is the ten foot job, and it is the one everybody designs for.

The edge carries three words. Crisp, radiant, resinous on the IPA. Authentic, zesty, mischief on White Rascal. That is the surface that faces you when you are standing at the end of the bar looking down a row of towers, which is the angle a customer actually approaches from most of the time. On almost every handle in the world it is blank white.

And the back is not an afterthought either. It carries a flat printed version of the same character, the full beer name and the style spelled out. Not a sculpt, because nobody is standing ten feet behind the tower, but not empty either.

That back face is doing a specific job. Your bartender looks at the back of your handle for an entire shift. They are the person who has to know, at a glance, which of eleven identical white handles is the Belgian white. The customer side sells. The back side informs.

The cheap version of a modular handle prints one panel and calls it done. This one decides what each surface is for, and spends differently on each.

Nobody weighs their tap handle

Here is the spec that never comes up on a sales call and causes more real problems than any other.

A tap handle is a lever on a faucet, and everything it weighs works against that faucet all day. A heavy handle puts steady torque on the shaft. It works itself loose over a shift so the handle ends up cocked sideways. On a crowded tower, heavy handles drag on their neighbors. And when you are shipping hundreds into accounts, weight is freight.

Nobody asks about it. Breweries ask about size, color and art. Then eight months later a bar manager mentions the handles keep going crooked, and nobody connects the two.

Avery is the account that made us chase it properly. After the first build was already in the field, we went back and cut weight three separate times. Not a redesign. Same handle, same look on the wall, less mass in your hand. The last revision in our files is literally named Superlight.

The honest version: this is not free. Taking weight out of a resin handle means thinning wall sections, and past a point a thin handle stops feeling like quality and starts feeling like a giveaway. The exercise is finding the floor before it reads cheap. That is why it took three passes and not one.

If you already have handles in accounts, go pick one up. If it feels like a hammer, that is a problem you are paying for and nobody has told you about.

The handle only works because the cans already work that way

Here is the part that makes a shared body defensible, and it has nothing to do with tap handles.

Pull up Avery's can lineup. Every can is the same frame. White field, the round A mark in the same corner, the beer name in the same weight and the same place, a vertical rule down the side, and then exactly two things that change: one illustration and one accent color.

The cans are already a modular system. Constant frame, swappable art.

So the handle is not a separate design decision. It is that same architecture carried onto the tower. Same white field, same round mark, same name treatment, and the illustration that sits flat on the can becomes the sculpt on the handle. The hop cone and the character are not handle art. They are can art that got pulled into three dimensions.

That is why the shared body does not feel like a compromise. It was not a cost decision that somebody rationalized afterward. A customer who picks up the four pack and then sees the handle on a wall three weeks later is looking at the same system twice.

Here is the diagnostic, and you can run it this afternoon. Stand six of your cans up on a table and cover the names. If a stranger can tell they are all the same brewery, your handles can share a body and they should. If every can is its own layout with its own lockup and its own logo treatment, a shared handle body will read as arbitrary, and the honest advice is to fix the packaging before you spend money on handles.

Most breweries design the handle in isolation, from a logo file, months after the packaging was settled and by whoever is free. The handle ends up being the last thing anybody thinks about and the first thing a customer touches.

Where this sits against the other two ways to do it

Three builds, three different answers to the same question, and the difference is which part you let change.

The sculpted goat we built for Greener Pastures changes nothing. One sculpt covers ten beers, because a young brewery going into distribution needs its name recognized before any single beer matters. The Sheetz coffee handles change a flat badge, because two drinks in the same family just need telling apart. Avery changes a sculpt, because the portfolio is deep, the brand is already known, and every beer deserves to look like itself.

The question is not which one is best. It is which part of your handle is allowed to change, and that answer moves as the brewery grows. For more on that call, read 7 Ways to Design a Beer Tap Handle and Do Custom Tap Handles Sell More Beer?

What does it take to order a system like this?

Modular handles get quoted by the build, because the body and the toppers price separately and the math changes with how many beers you plan to run. Send us the lineup and we will price it honestly instead of guessing in a blog post. We do not charge new customers a design fee to draw their handle, and every order runs through our shop in Birmingham, Alabama.

If you want something simpler to start, our stock tap handles take your logo at 12 units, and a blank stock handle ships at 1.

Send a logo, a can, or a phone snapshot of a sketch on the custom tap handle quote page, or look through finished work in our resin tap handles and custom tap handles.

Want two more builds start to finish? Read how Monday Night Brewing's Dr. Robot came together, or the custom sword handle for Next Quest Brewing.

Frequently asked questions

What is a modular tap handle?

One handle body with a changeable topper on the face. The brewery's identity stays on the body and the beer changes with the topper, so a new or seasonal beer costs a topper instead of a whole handle.

Does a modular tap handle have to look generic?

No, and that is the common misread. If the changeable part is a printed panel it will read generic. If it is a sculpted, hand-painted piece it reads like a custom handle, because it is one. The shared part is the body, not the character.

Should our tap handle match our can design?

It should inherit the system, not copy the label. If your cans already share a frame with a changeable illustration, build the handle on the same logic and let the illustration become the dimensional part. If your cans have no shared system, the handle will not create one on its own.

What should go on the back of a tap handle?

Information, not decoration. The customer side is what sells the beer, but your bartender stares at the back of that handle all shift and has to pick it out of a row of similar handles. The full beer name and style on the back does more work than a repeat of the logo.

Is a modular handle better than a handle per beer?

It depends on what the handle has to do. Modular wins when you have a deep or rotating lineup and a brand people already recognize. A single dedicated sculpt wins when one beer has to stand out on a crowded wall and nobody knows you yet. Most breweries end up doing both, at different stages.

How much should a tap handle weigh?

Lighter than most of the ones in the field. Weight puts constant torque on the faucet shaft, which is what makes handles sit crooked after a few months, and it adds freight on every shipment into accounts. There is a floor, because too light stops feeling like quality, so the goal is finding it rather than just cutting mass.

Can you change the artwork on a tap handle without buying new handles?

Yes, if the handle was designed for it from the start. A handle built as one piece cannot be changed later. A handle built with a topper window can, and that decision has to be made before anything gets tooled.

Will a custom handle fit our existing faucets?

Yes. Our handles use a 3/8-16 thread, the standard on US beer faucets, so they install without adapters or special hardware.