A row of four tasting glasses with liquids of colors ranging between straw yellow and fresh orange juice sits on a wooden panel. Nearby, a middle-aged man with reading glasses and graying hair futzes around on an iPhone. The scene’s POV then flips, showing a bored young woman recording what will later become a TikTok, captioned:
“When you can’t drink until your dad logs it on untappd.” [sic throughout]
When one thinks of a typical craft beer drinker, it’s easy to conjure the lazy stereotype of a bearded and whip-thin big-city millennial who wears cool vintage T-shirts and has a fondness for the latest and greatest hazies. But, it’s so often forgotten that craft beer is hardly a new phenomenon. It’s been around for decades, which means your typical IPA drinker these days might be some 50-something suburban dad, and he might very well have a Zoomer daughter hell bent on roasting his craft beer affectations on TikTok.
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Actually, it’s not a case of might. These dads and daughters exist. And of late, the social media platform has become a dunk contest for users mocking the love of tiny tasters, beertography, and, especially, social media check-ins for what we’ll dub their “Dads Untappd.”
As the Home Depot theme plays — an often-used musical cue on the app to denote quintessential dad-ness — teen user notemilieembbury captions her TikTok: “beer dad = activated.” We see her POV as her father, with a graying beard, Hillsboro Hops baseball cap (a Portland-area minor league team), and quintessential dadbod checks off all the typical, in her opinion, tasks of a Dad Untappd: sampler acquired (CHECK), photo of his flight (CHECK), logging them on Untappd (OF COURSE), and snack of Kettle Chips washed down with a wee glass of an amber liquid. At the end of the video, he proudly holds up the flight board for his daughter to see.
The comments for all these TikToks always bring more DoDU (daughters of Dads Untappd) into the conversation, almost like a support group.
“MY DAD DOES THE SAME,” replies one TikToker. “i think our dads would get along great,” says another. “MY DAD HAS THE SAME APP AND ITS TRACKED BASICALLY MY ENTIRE CHILDHOOD FROM BEHIND A BEER GLASS,” claims a 19-year-old user from Boulder. “all of the dads love untappd,” adds Carrie. “untappd might be my dad’s most consistent social media,” says Lily.
To these teenage and young adult TikTokers, their Dads Untappd beer geekery is from another generation. Even for craft beer fans, we have to admit the days of it being the hip, new thing, enjoyed strictly by a young cognoscenti, are well over. Craft beer is as mainstream as can be, now sold at supermarkets and strip mall Applebee’s, at gas stations and professional sporting events. What was, just a decade ago, the signifier of a drinker who enjoyed the flavorful, the obscure, the anti-corporate, the artisan, the craft of quality beverages, is now seen as something else: a dorky pursuit of older guys with mortgages, respectable jobs, and comfortable New Balance sneakers.
Do you even BORG, bro?
To be clear, these TikToks are 100 percent affectionate in their mocking. As a dad of a daughter myself, I can tell these young women don’t want to necessarily spend their afternoons in another boring, industrial, vibeless brewery. But at the same time, you can see they love hanging with their dads — so whatever, sure, they’ll tag along. (I’m just glad my daughter is only 6 and doesn’t have an iPhone to mock my drinking proclivities.)
These kids just can’t stop themselves from following their Dads Untappd wherever they go. See yet another TikTok set to the Home Depot theme music. POV: You take dad to a brewery.
Yes, of course, it features another gray-haired, bearded man. This time, our Dad Untappd sports Oakleys atop his head and a Ted Lasso novelty T-shirt. We see him walking through Sierra Nevada Brewing in Asheville, N.C., like a kid at a candy store, photographing equipment, gleefully pointing out Wild Turkey bourbon barrels filled with aging beer, and posing with enlarged label art. His bored progeny occasionally appear on screen, their heads tucked down into their phones, a stark dichotomy to their elated pops.
The funny thing is, though, you don’t realize how much you miss your Dad Untappd until you’re not with him any more.
Such is the case in the most viral of this genre of videos, with over 2 million views, 300,000 likes, and 700 comments. It’s only five seconds long, posted by Haley (user milfpractice), who notes that she usually goes to breweries with her — yes, gray-haired — dad where he annoys her by making her pose with his beers — once even when she had just been dumped two hours earlier, she claims.
In the viral TikTok, however, she is alone, a forlorn look on her face. The simple caption reads:
“me when i get a little homesick so i log into the app my dad uses to log and review craft beer he drinks so i can see what he’s up to,” she writes. It’s sweet and sincere, and a dream sentiment if you’re a dad yourself.
Still, she can’t help tweaking her dad one last time.
“on saturday he enjoyed an IPA with his friend keith. he gave it a 4.75 out of 5 :)”
