Tapping In / Fingers in Drink

Submission 8,501

About

Tapping In refers to the act of putting your Fingers In Your Drink as a pre-drinking ritual to "tap in" or signal that you're having a, alcoholic drink, although the exact meaning of the trend is unclear. The trend was started by hockey content creator and X (Twitter) user @heatdaddy69420, who claims to have started it around 2018. It was popularized in 2023 when HeatDaddy began posting photos of his fingers in drinks to X along with captions about tapping in, inspiring others to do the same.

Origin

X user HeatDaddy, a host of the Wet Jeans podcast who regularly posts about hockey, is known to use the phrase "tap in" to describe the act of drinking. For example, on April 27th, 2023, the X^[1] user posted, "Gonna tap in to several chilly ones today is anyone with me." On July 4th, he posted the earliest known example of a "tapping in" photo to X,^[2] in which his fingers are photographed inside of his drink, writing, "Y’all mind if I get fucked up at brunch? Who’s with me," garnering over 350 likes in five months. He posted two similar photos to X^[3]^[4] that night, showing his fingers in drinks at the bar (shown below, left and center). Several commenters posted photos of their own fingers in drinks to "tap in" with the user.

On July 22nd, he posted another photo of his fingers in a drink to X,^[5] writing, "Tap in," garnering over 800 likes in five months (shown below, right). This is the earliest known post to combine a "tap in" photo with the phrase "tap in."

According to a 2023 X^[6] post by @heatdaddy69420, he created the trend of tapping in and "tap in culture" in 2018 and has thousands of photographs of him tapping in.

Spread

HeatDaddy continued to make "tap in" posts to X throughout 2023, inspiring increasing responses from their X^[7]^[8] followers, who began sharing photos of themselves tapping in as well, both in response to HeatDaddy's posts or of their own volition (examples from throughout 2023 shown below).

On July 26th, 2023, HeatDaddy made two tapping in posts to X^[9]^[10] while at a baseball game, the captions explaining that the particular tap ins were in honor of his "racist grandpa," garnering over 2,000 likes and 2,500 likes respectively in five months (shown below, left and right).

On December 17th, HeatDaddy posted a tap in photo to X^[11] that garnered over 2,300 likes in a day (shown below). On December 18th, Redditor /u/ccalzone made a post on /r/OutOfTheLoop^[12] asking for the context behind tapping in, garnering over 80 upvotes in under a day.