Brooklyn Beer Pilsner Ceramic Tap Handle

This is the Brooklyn Pilsner Ceramic 12"Tap Handle

Brooklyn has always been a haven for immigrants and entrepreneurs. In the 19th Century, many of the immigrants were Germans who brought with them their taste for good beer and their tradition of brewing beer by the Reinheitsgebot, the purity law that since the 1500?s has legally forbidden the use of any ingredients other than hops, malted barley and wheat, yeast and water. Brooklyn, along with cities like St. Louis and Milwaukee with large German populations, became one of America?s foremost brewing centers in the 1800s.

One hundred years ago, there were no fewer than 48 breweries in Brooklyn. Taverns were community civic centers where the important issues of the day were debated by everyone from politicians to the workers who built the Brooklyn Bridge.

In the afternoon and evening, it was common to see children scurrying back and forth to breweries and neighborhood taverns carrying pails of fresh beer, known as growlers, for their parents to enjoy with dinner. Brewers themselves were civic and social leaders, and their monuments remain an impressive part of Brooklyn?s Evergreen Cemetery.

The last of those great brewing families, Schaefer and Liebmann (Rheingold), closed their Brooklyn breweries in 1976, victims of competition with bigger Midwest breweries that produced vast volumes of beer more cheaply over the country?s new highway system and peddled them through televisions commercials that sold ?national? beers as superior to local ones. By then, the light pilsner beers made with corn and rice as well as malted barley that most Americans drank had little in common with the full-flavored robust lagers and ales brewed before Prohibition.