To follow up:
I thought about chugger and would've probably gone that route but they're entirely out of stock (plastic heads too) and I was impatient.
In regards to lead I found the following statement from NSF:
http://www.nsf.org/business/water_distribution/faq.asp
Apparently lead isn't even soluble in low ph water. A solid lead fitting passes the NSF test using ph 5 water (which is darn near the exact ph of wort). The same fitting fails miserably using the ph 10 water. To quote, "PH 10 test water was 71 times more aggressive for lead leaching than the pH 5 test water."
I think concerns about lead leaching from brass are *greatly* overstated in our application. I see many brewers making alarmist statements about brass and copper and these sorts of statements get passed around here as fact.
caveat emptor: I am not a plumber and do not work for the NSF.
Edit:
I found an academic article looking at lead leaching into drinking water.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19847713
I pulled the full article pdf and it's not that helpful as they didn't look at acidic water. But they did note that lead leaching from brass escalates as ph increases (although there's a ceiling to this effect at around a ph of 9). So higher ph does equate to more leaching but this really doesn't confirm or disconfirm the NSFs finding that low ph water is not an aggressive leacher of lead.
Incidentally, they also found that leaching takes time, with lead levels reaching equilibrium at around 24 hours. Being that the wort isn't in contact with the brass for more than a couple hours at most this too should be comforting. And we're talking about brass fittings/pump heads, not brass pipe anyway.
There's also this article (full text is free, it's super short)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1519760/pdf/envhper00373-0042.pdf
They didn't look at ph exactly but looked at the aggressiveness index which is a function of ph and hardness with higher ph and harder water being more aggressive. Conclusion: more aggressive water dissolves more lead into the drinking water.
Here's an Irish article on the subject of plumbosolvency where they say (but do not show) that lead is more readily dissolved in low ph water (i.e. acidic). So I'm not sure.
Rónan Daly, Martin Kimber. "Lead piping and plumbosolvency." Engineers Journal Volume 63, Issue 1: January/February 2009
I'm a social scientist, not a chemist by trade so this is getting a bit out of my element. In particular I expect the solvency of lead in wort is compounded by the fact that it's bound up with other metals in brass. In other words, lead solvency is not the same thing as brass-containing-lead-solvency.
My take away:
1. we excrete trace amounts of lead, it will accumulate but you must have high exposure over prolonged periods of time.
2. lead's effects are most damaging on children. Don't give your kids homebrew
Duh!
3. we're dealing with small amounts of brass (not brass pipe) that contain small amounts of lead. We're not brewing with lead pipe.
4. the ph of wort is probably not conducive to lead dissolution
5. lead dissolution takes time anyway
6. lead exposure concerns are for drinking water. I hope you're not drinking homebrew like it was water!
There. Feel better?
