[extremely Baz Luhrmann in “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen” voice]
Ladies and gentlemen of the brewing industry of 2025:
Make hop water.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, hop water would be it.
***
The old newsroom joke holds that news is what happens to editors. Here’s something that’s happened to me: I want to buy hop water, and all too often, despite living in the coastal-ish top-50 metropolitan area of Richmond, Va., more or less surrounded by breweries, I can’t. When I travel, the problem persists. Hop water — in its simplest form, your standard non-alcoholic seltzer infused with hops — is a rare sighting on store shelves across the country. Trust me: I’ve been keeping an eye out.
Last year around this time, I wrote a call to aromatic arms, urging brewers to make hop water because a) I want to drink it and b) because the beverage offers the “year-round potential to bolster [their] bottom line and put [their] brand in front of new drinkers.” In a fiercely competitive craft brewing market that has contracted for two consecutive years, that recently crossed its positive closure-rate Rubicon, that is being polarized by drinker demand to either end of the alcohol-by-volume spectrum, this has only become more true. I like non-alcoholic beer just fine, but it’s hard to make and caloric to drink. Hop water is neither, and it’s commanding comparable price points — not just from me.
In the intervening 12 months since that column, an additional handful of established craft brewers, non-alcoholic players, and other startups have started doing just that. It’s not quite a proper segment yet; I have yet to find myself in a retailer with more than two hop water SKUs at a time, nor a restaurant with more than one. (The latter is almost always Hoppy Refresher, Lagunitas’s pack-leading entrant, which comes in clear glass bottles and, to my palate, carries an off-flavor of strawberry. But I digress.) Still, things are clearly sloshing in hop water’s direction. Scan data from NIQ shared with Hop Take by 3Tier Beverages shows that off-premise sales of the beverage were up 20 percent year-over-year for the 52 weeks through Dec. 28, 2024. The firm has been tracking hop waters as a segment within the non-alcoholic category for the past couple of years. Its sales spike in January — 2024 was up 48 percent over 2023 for the month — but Mary Mills, 3Tier consultant, tells Hop Take by phone, it’s got legs year-round. “I really don’t think this is a fad,” she says.
Hop water may not be a flash in the pan, but it’s not quite a full-fledged segment yet, either. A look at the top five hop waters in NIQ scans suggests that the market is still very much coming together. After the Heineken-backed Hoppy Refresher comes HOP WTR (in which Constellation Brands invested a minority stake in 2021); Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.’s Hop Splash; Hop Lark (minority-staked by Brooklyn Brewery circa 2023); and Sparkle Hops from Oregon’s Pelican Bay Brewing. If one of those brands seems not like the others to you, you’re not wrong. “There’s a pretty big drop-off” between No. 4 and No. 5, Mills says, indicating the space has yet to fully calcify with the competitive bunching of more mature product categories. “I don’t think anybody else will break into that top five space,” she adds, “but I think there’s room for regional craft brewers to have an offering, just to have something to differentiate.”
I’m happy to report that more players are seeing — and seizing — that opportunity across the country. For example, at the end of last year, Allagash Brewing Company announced the rollout of its own signature hop water, which it’d been testing on-premise in its Maine taproom since June 2024. “As soon as we announced [the pilot program], local restaurants were asking for it, and it came up in conversation with off- premise retail partners as well and with our distributors,” sales director Josh Fruchtman tells Hop Take, “so we decided to put some branding against it and give it a shot out in the trade.”
To my eye, this is more than just a casual “shot.” The package bears prominent Allagash branding, and the liquid is brewed with orange peel like the brewery’s flagship Belgian white ale. The famously disciplined firm is routing 6- and 12-packs of it through its existing beer distribution network in nine states up and down the East Coast, markets where “we have such an incredibly strong brand equity that’s taken decades for us to build,” says Fruchtman. It’s a signal that Allagash is taking hop water seriously, which itself is a signal that everybody else should too, as far as I’m concerned.
As the hop water segment is still taking shape, how to position it to John & Jane Q. Guzzler is still an open question. Is it a more flavorful club soda or a brighter, lighter non-alcoholic craft beer? Retailers are mostly tending toward the latter, which makes sense — NA beer is a booming segment, after all, and most hop water SKUs are coming from companies brewing some sort of beer.
It’s not much of a leap, and even less so when the producer is already NA-focused. Partake Brewing officially entered the hop water segment just yesterday hoping to complement its existing portfolio and capture “occasions” that, say, its NA IPA simply can’t. “As we surveyed our own customer base and our own employees, people started to come out and say, ‘There’s a time and a place where I’d still love an adult-style beverage, albeit, you know, something a bit more daytime-oriented and refreshment-oriented,’” says Ted Fleming, the founder and chief executive of the Canadian NA brewer. Thus, Hop Twist, a Citra-hopped offering rolling out to U.S. markets in 12-packs now. “We have Hop Twist as sort of a secondary brand,” he says, describing the firm’s positioning strategy with distributors (mostly traditional beer wholesalers in the U.S.) and retailers alike. “We’re hoping to to have that Partake consumer that’s already coming to the shelf to buy us say, ‘Hey, let’s give this new product from Partake a try.’”
If hop water is to cement its place in the national plan-o-gram long-term, it will be because drinkers start to seek it out on its own merit, rather than as an alternative to an alternative.
“I don’t think that hop waters do the same thing for people that NA beer does,” contends Ryan Coleman, the founder and owner of HIKE Hopped Seltzer, a Richmond-based, Williamsburg-contract-brewed brand that hit some of my local shelves in 2023. Most retailers he works with across Virginia, North Carolina, and Washington D.C., merchandise HIKE with NA beer, which he considers beneficial for now because its premium price point compares more favorably with craft beer than with traditional seltzers and sodas. (Another benefit: This positioning elides the subject of slotting fees, the payola, verboten to alcohol firms, that most other companies fork over to supermarkets for placements.) “I think of it as a seltzer that’s done very thoughtfully, almost like a Spindrift with hops, but not quite so full of juice,” he says.
Personally, I think that’s a compelling “flavor story” (as they say in the trade) for hop water’s future, but maybe I’m biased. I hoard all the 6-packs of Hoplark I can get ahold of like a boomer with a blizzard in the forecast, and I’ve taken to ordering HIKE from Coleman by the case. Can brewers tap into that sort of deranged demand across the American drinking public? They have more brewing capacity than there is beer to brew, and consumers clearly have the thirst for fuller NA flavors than traditional seltzers can offer. There’s a deal to be done there!
I don’t think hop water is going to be “the next big thing” for the brewing industry, because I don’t think there is any one next thing, but if I could bet on one incremental sales opportunity for the craft brewing industry with future staying power, hop water would be it.
