What Is Hop Water, and Who Is Actually Drinking It?

For a few years now I have been seeing hop water. First one brand at the back of a cooler, then a shelf of them, and now nearly every brewery with a taproom has one. What I almost never see is a person drinking it. A product that is everywhere and in nobody's hand makes me curious. Who is it for? Is it standing in for a beer or for a seltzer? What is the moment when someone decides this is the can to open? Do they nurse it the way you nurse a beer, or drink it down like water after a run? So I went looking, and the answer explains the strangest thing about the category.

Hop water is sparkling water with hops steeped in it. No grain and no fermentation, so no alcohol, no calories, and no beer. Hops go into water, the water is carbonated, and the can leaves the building as a soft drink. The smell is an IPA: citrus, pine, something green. The taste mostly is not.

Now the odd part. Nearly every craft brewery has launched one. Constellation Brands, the company behind Corona and Modelo in the United States, bought the rest of HOP WTR this spring. And the category still shrank. Hop water sold about $28.5 million at US retail in the year to last October, down 7.3 percent, while non-alcoholic beer grew 18 percent. The whole category is about three percent the size of non-alcoholic beer, and it is moving the other way.

The shelf is full because the product is easy to make. It is shrinking because the person it was built for and the person who picks it up are not the same person, and neither of them is sure what is in the can.

The first one was a homebrewer's project, H2OPS, sold out of a California backyard from 2014, and for years it was a category of one.

The one that gave the category its story came four years later. Dean Eberhardt was twenty five days into a month off drinking, sitting in a brewery while a friend ordered a double IPA, when he realized what he missed was not the alcohol but the hops. Hoplark followed in 2018.

That August, Lagunitas, owned by Heineken, released a product it simply called Hop Water, hops and a pinch of brewer's yeast, and in its first year it was practically the whole category.

After that the launches run together, and by 2023 there were more than two dozen brands in chain retail where there had been three.

Because it is the easiest non-alcoholic product a brewery can make with what it already owns. Non-alcoholic beer is fermented and then has its alcohol taken out, and taking it out well is expensive, which is why non-alcoholic drinks cost what they cost. Doug Veliky of Revolution Brewing in Chicago told VinePair that making it the way the brewery wanted to, "we'd be looking at a $1 million investment." Hop water needs hops, water, a tank and a canning line, all of which a brewery has, and nothing to remove.

The law helps: no malt, so the TTB never sees it, and the FDA treats it as a soft drink.

And it sits beside the pint rather than against it. Veliky again: hop water "can also be enjoyed alongside and in between beers," where non-alcoholic beer is mostly "instead of." The between-drinks pattern has its own essay here. A can that costs almost nothing to add and does not compete with the pint gets added. It is a brewer's product before it is a drinker's.

The founders built it for beer drinkers. Jordan Bass of HOP WTR says it was developed as a beer replacement, and that people turned out to drink it all day, "including morning and lunchtime."

Hoplark asked its own customers, and most of them had gone to the shelf looking for sparkling water. Non-alcoholic beer was the second answer, and most drink it at any hour rather than at beer hours.

So the beer drinker is in there. The beer occasion mostly is not.

Lagunitas found the rest in its own research before it rebranded Hoppy Refresher this year: asked to describe the drink, people could not agree "whether it is a seltzer, a watered-down beer, a water that tastes like beer, a soda." The brand's answer was to stop chasing everyone. The new target is "beer lovers who don't always want alcohol," and the hydration and wellness shoppers were let go.

Built for the beer drinker at six in the evening. Bought by the seltzer drinker at two in the afternoon. Neither is sure what is in the can, and the biggest brand in the category just narrowed its audience on purpose to fix that.

A pack of hop water sells at craft beer prices. The best sellers average about $8.50 a pack. An eight pack of LaCroix is three to five dollars.

The price is the hops, the one ingredient it cannot skimp on, with no malt bill to spread the cost across. Veliky warned brewers about the reaction, in the spelling he used: "There will be pushback from customers on price because 'iT's jUsT La cRoIx.'" The customer is right about the glass and wrong about the bill.

Lagunitas, the biggest brand in the category, decided the problem was never the liquid and rewrote the label to say who the drink is for.

That is the whole category in one move. The first half took a tank and a canning line. The second half takes a label that tells the beer drinker this one is for them. I still have not seen anyone drink one in public. When I do, I expect it will be someone who had a beer the round before.