You can make the best version of a hop water and truly showcase the hops inside the can.įrom a consumer perspective, hop waters are a product you can drink all day. Whereas with hop water, you actually get to create a drink that is almost like the purest expression of hops. … It’s hard for everyone to get super excited around that.”

“When you make a beer, and then you run it through some process to strip all the alcohol away, it feels like you’re dumbing everything down. “The challenge with making non-alcoholic beers is you’re always taking something away,” Sierra Nevada’s VP of Technical Innovation and Brewing Sean Lavery told us. In fact, although Sierra Nevada has been making non-alcoholic beers for a long time, they’re way more excited about their hop water-Hop Splash. But according to Sierra Nevada, that would be a big mistake. You might want to group hop water in the same category as non-alcoholic beer. The Important Difference Between Hop Water and Non-Alcoholic Beer Photography courtesy of Lagunitas Brewing Company

That’s a significant accomplishment for a drink that doesn’t contain alcohol and isn’t technically considered a non-alcoholic beer. ParadisoĪlthough still a nascent category (the very first hop water from a brand called H2OPS appeared on the market in 2014), hop water has already grown significantly.īetween August 2021 and August 2022, hop waters generated $5.5 million in sales, surging by 142.5% from the year prior, according to NielsonIQ’s Off Premises data.Īnd here’s a pretty eye-popping stat: The hop water category climbed to the fifth-biggest growing craft-style beverage in the U.S., with sales increasing by just shy of forty-four percent last year, despite craft beer sales as a whole dropping by 7.2% based on Nielsen data through October 2022.Īnd just to give you an accurate picture of hop water’s popularity, the styles that ranked above hop water included hazy imperial/double/triple IPA in first place, followed by hazy American pale ale, American lager, and hazy IPA. The Recent Growth of Hop Water Photography courtesy of John A. “No grains are used in this brew, so it’s 100 percent non-alcoholic with zero carbs, zero calories, and gluten-free.”Īll this means that hop waters are poised to make a significant dent in a growing category of beyond-beer and non-alcoholic offerings. “Hop water is carbonated water infused with the flavoring of hops,” she explains in an email to Hop Culture. Similarly, Paige Guzman, chief marketing officer at Lagunitas, one of if not the first brewery to release a hop water back in 2018, points out the ability of hop waters to truly express the flavors of hops. “You don’t have barley and malt components integral to beer, so for hop heads, hop water is a really cool way to experience that pure hop flavor and different varieties of hops.” “It’s really a pure expression of hops and hop flavors that isn’t masked by anything else,” Sierra Nevada Brand Director Kyle Ingram told us. But hop waters are so much more than that. It may seem like hop water is just hops, water, and a little bit of carbonation. And Lagunitas has been a pioneer in the hop water category for the last four years, releasing Hoppy Refresher in 2018.īut over the past few years, craft breweries across the country have ::cough, cough:: dipped their toes into the pretty cool “hop water.” What Is Hop Water? Photography courtesy of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company

Just hops and water in a can or on draft, hop waters are a seemingly simple non-alcoholic beverage that has quickly made a massive splash in the NA craft category.įor instance, bigger breweries such as Sierra Nevada released their own version-Hop Splash-in early 2022 after almost two years of research and development. A few years ago, we speculated: Is Craft Sparkling Water the Next Big Thing? While we can’t say we predicted that trend, we got pretty close breweries decided to take things further by adding hops to sparkling water.

Hop splash