Zac and Meghan Crow are tapping into LoHi.
The couple opened the self-pour franchise Tapster on June 26 at 3200 Tejon St. in Denver, inviting patrons to pick from any of the 54 taps.
Three-quarters are filled with local brews, according to Zac Crow. There are also seltzers, taps with ciders, cocktails and hard liquor, plus three with nonalcoholic drinks.
“One of our most popular ones is WeldWerks Juicy Bits IPA,” Zac Crow said. “But one of the things that obviously is not local is Guinness. That’s been our most popular in the four days we’ve been open.”
To get the juices flowing, customers open a tab when they walk in and receive a Tapster-branded card that will charge back to the original tab on file. Then, they can tap the card above each spout and start pouring. Prices are by the ounce and run as low as 40 cents to well over a dollar for liquor.
Tapster doesn’t serve food outside of light snacks, but Zac Crow said customers are encouraged to bring in takeout from other spots. He’s also talking with restaurants on the block to set up a delivery or pickup system through which Tapster patrons can get bites.
The spot also has a private room available for rent, he said.
“We’ll have a very heavy rotation (of drinks) because we’re using just small kegs,” he said. “And that will keep our tap wall fresh and keep our guests coming back and trying something different even week to week.”
The Crows signed a 10-year lease for the 2,800 square feet in October before running into delays with the construction and permitting process, which cost them $500,000 total.
Both are Colorado natives and Colorado State University alums, so they wanted to bring a local flavor to the franchise. Aspen wood that they picked up from Cañon City covers the tap wall, and a local artist painted murals of mountains and pine trees around the space.
The Crows also have plenty of gold and green around to honor their alma mater — “but we don’t want to piss off CU fans,” Zac Crow said. Part of the reason they chose to open a Tapster, he added, is because of its customization.
“It’s not your cookie-cutter franchise,” he said. “In most franchises, they’re going to look exactly the same. But every Tapster is different and customized to local regions.”
The couple met while working together at Austin’s American Grill out of college. Meghan Crow became a dental hygienist, and Zac Crow later went into accounting, where he ended up at a firm that focused solely on franchises.
Through that, he learned about Tapster and decided he wanted to open one in his home state. The spot’s first location opened in Chicago in 2017 and grew to six locations in Seattle, Washington; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Cleveland, Ohio; and Lexington, Kentucky; before the Crows added Denver.
“We wanted something where people can come and socialize and just hang out,” Zac Crow said. “And from the business perspective, it made a lot of sense to have a place that isn’t super labor intensive. And just the system itself uses tech that reduces waste and theft.”
It’s not the first time a self-serve tap company has made a run of it in Denver. First Draft, which operated for 10 years in RiNo, had some 40 taps before it closed last summer, attributing a downtick in business to a different crowd in the neighborhood post-COVID.
