Buffalo Bill's Brewpub Beer

From 1983 to 1994, this tap handle dispensed beer from the bar at Buffalo Bill's Brewery, one of the nation's first post-Prohibition brewpubs, founded by photographer Bill Owens in Hayward, California, in 1983.

Small, "micro" brewers changed where and how many Americans drank beer. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, brewers worked to change legislation in their states to enable brewers to sell beer to customers to enjoy on-site, in the same location where it had been brewed, often with food. Brewpubs—an early 1980s innovation—functioned as informal gathering places that united producers with consumers and invited the community into the brewery. In this way, craft beer’s taprooms became a new kind of “third place,” in the words of a 1980s sociologist: a place for people to meet and relax that was neither the home nor the office.