Tapped Enterprises: Looking for a Ticket to Ride?




With breweries, craft beers bars and beer-centric festivals popping up everywhere lately, this is definitely an exciting time for beer lovers and those just getting into the scene. However, all these alcohol based events do pose a bit of a problem, especially living on Long Island where everything is fairly spread out: How can you engage in these imbibing activities while safely transporting yourself home? Well, Kevin Bowker at Tapped Enterprises has that taken care of for you.


Tapped Enterprises provides transportation to beer festivals as well as brewery tours, wine tours and custom bachelor/bachelorette/any celebration parties. But like most companies, Tapped Enterprises had humble beginnings and has come a long way. Kevin Bowker started Tapped Enterprises in 2008 selling posters and beer flags to college kids. For awhile, he spent most of his time in his van, travelling to different campuses and selling his wares. When he returned home from this entrepreneurial road trip, he decided to set up a table at the first ever Nassau Coliseum Craft Beer Festival to display and sell his beer merchandise to a different and wider audience, as craft beer was really taking off at the time. As most tend to do at these festivals, a group of Kevin’s friends had too much to drink, but since he was working he was able to safely transport them home in his van. This is where the idea for Tapped Enterprises as you know it today was born.


In 2012, Tapped Enterprises bought their own 14 passenger bus for smaller groups, but they also have access to large coach busses that can transport around 50 people. They also lauched www.libeerbus.com in addition to their other websites: www.lipubcrawls.com, www.libackyardgames.com and of course www.TappedEnterprises.com. They aim to generate a fun atmosphere for likeminded people that share a passion. Kevin’s tagline since they began was “innovation for celebration”, and he has carried out this motto by providing safe annual transportation to events such as the Great South Bay Sleigh Ride and coordinating a Halloween Pub Crawl. For all the wine lovers out there, Tapped is planning on putting together even more vineyard tours this year.


“Half the party is on the bus” was one of the quotes Kevin closed his interview with, so we see it only fitting to close our article the same way. We can attest to this, having just taken a Tapped Enterprises trip to Tap NY (his 3rd venture to the festival), where the 4+ hour bus ride felt less like a school field trip and more like a mobile festival before the festival. Not to mention how nice it was to have about 45 attendees all under the care of one very jovial DD: Frank the bus driver. We had a great time on our maiden voyage with Tapped Enterprises and are looking forward to boarding the bus again very soon.

Written by A+K

May 10th, 2013 at 1:25 am

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