On a sunny day in late summer, I pedaled my way to Portland’s Great Notion Brewing. Cofounder Paul Reiter and VP of quality assurance Tom Hayden joined me at a table and, as I dabbed the sweat from my brow, poured a glass of water with a soft shimmer of haze.
It had the delicate aroma that, to a beer fan, might have been redolent of hops. The flavor followed suit—natural-tasting and bright, with a hint of tartness and a clean, dry finish. I detected no alcohol flavor nor fermentation character, and my body told me to take deep, quenching gulps. Had they told me it was an artisanal French mineral water, I wouldn’t have blinked. Instead, it was their newest creation: Hard Hop Water.
It’s too early to call this a category, but Great Notion’s offering isn’t the first. Hopped hard seltzer has been around for a few years, albeit in a niche. Meanwhile, a steadily growing number of breweries are producing hop water as a refreshing, nonalcoholic option for customers—coinciding, notably, with recent innovations in advanced hop products. Given (soft) hop water’s growing presence, the nomenclature makes a certain kind of sense.
Besides Great Notion’s offering, future hard-hop-water historians may also take note of the Hard Hop Water from Pollyanna in Chicago’s southwest suburb of Lemont, released in January 2024. Other examples or their cousins have cropped up here and there since. I also spoke to Thad Briggs, cofounder and director of brewing operations at Mountain Toad in Golden, Colorado; he had just brewed their first batch, a low-alcohol version hopped with Strata CGX.
Great Notion and Pollyanna took different routes to the finish line—Great Notion makes a hard-seltzer base, while Pollyanna Brewing & Distilling spikes hop water with their in-house vodka. Yet they independently labeled them as “hard hop waters” instead of something like Citra Hard Seltzer or Citra Tonic.
Yet hop water—regular, 0 percent ABV hop water—is an established category now, and the breweries making these products see a unique niche in them. And they’re choosing the name as a signal to the customers they’re targeting: beer drinkers.
Hop Waters, Hard and Soft
When we sit down to talk, Great Notion’s Reiter invokes the “fourth category” of beer-adjacent beverages.
A few days before we meet, the market research firm NIQ had released a report valuing this category—in which they include seltzer, spirit and wine RTDs, and FMBs—at $13 billion. And, while hard seltzers are in decline, the other three are growing from 10 to 13 percent per year. In total, the fourth category now commands an estimated 12 percent of all alcohol sales.
Regular hop water isn’t doing those kinds of numbers, but it is a bright spot for breweries that can make it in a snap. At the mid-year report for 2024, it constituted just less than a half a percent of overall craft sales, about the same as craft light lager. Total sales were around $28 million, up 50 percent from a year earlier.
“We are always thinking about the next generation of drinkers,” Reiter says. “They like RTDs, they like different things. You have to have a different approach with the TikTok generation.”
Great Notion isn’t afraid of innovation. Among the first-gen wave of hazy IPA houses when they opened in 2016, they’ve concocted everything from dessert sours to milkshake IPAs. Nine years in, they’re looking for paths to new customers. They’d made hard seltzers in the past, but they found surprising success in the nonalcoholic sphere. “Our hop waters were doing well, selling better than expected,” Reiter says.
So, why not make a version with alcohol and grab a slice of that fourth-category pie?
At Pollyanna, Brian Pawola—wearing the hats of cofounder, head brewer, and distiller—tells a similar story: They, too, were seeing surprisingly strong sales of their regular hop water.
“And, one day,” he says, “one of our brewers was like, ‘You know what would taste good in this? ... A shot of vodka.’ And you know, we all tried it, and we’re like, ‘Hey, that’s pretty good.’” Because the brewery already made vodka, it was a simple process.
A Nonbeer for the Beer Crowd
Since it first started appearing, I’ve been surprised at how many breweries seem to be having success with products labeled as “hop water.” How much do regular consumers really understand about hops and what they taste like?
That, it turns out, is more a feature than a bug. The word “hop” has become a beacon for beer drinkers. Hop water doesn’t taste like beer—not really—but it’s familiar enough to beer fans that it can entice them when they’re looking for an alcohol-free drink.
Since launching their Hard Hop Water, Pollyanna has seen interest grow among the same group attracted to their regular hop water.
“I would say it’s beer drinkers that are looking for something refreshing on the patio,” Pawola says, “when they still want to continue to consume alcohol, but they enjoy the lighter option, the—if you will—‘hydrating’ alcohol. So, it’s really the beer drinker that’s just looking for something different.”
Initially, I’d assumed this was a product for the nonbeer drinker. Why would you make something that’s not beer for beer drinkers, when you already make beer?
At Great Notion, however, Reiter’s take jibes with that of Pawola: “We wanted to go after our beer customers,” he says. They make it for the beer drinkers who want something lighter than their regular offerings.
Photo: Courtesy Pollyanna Brewing
Cleanliness Is Key
If hard hop water has an advantage over hard seltzers and other fourth-category drinks, it’s in the potential for a very clean, natural palate.
Because Great Notion flavors their version solely with hops, the goal is to scale back flavors derived from alcohol and fermentation as much as possible. Production manager Rob McCoy decided to use their seltzer base, made by fermenting dextrose water to about 11.6 percent ABV. At that point, “There are some definite fermentation flavors,” he says.
Before diluting, Great Notion runs the base through a carbon filter to pull out those flavors. “If you don’t carbon filter, you get a citrusy funkiness to it,” McCoy says. They dilute to 5 percent ABV—not because that’s the accepted standard strength, but because of flavor.
“At 5 percent you’re able to get the most alcohol with the lowest alcohol flavor,” McCoy says. They acidify their Hard Hop Water to 4.1 pH to add crispness, and it harmonizes well with the hops—two pounds per barrel. The result is a product that tastes and drinks like a lightly flavored sparkling water. Perhaps because of the presence of alcohol, the hop flavors seem to integrate better than they do in many nonalcoholic hop waters.
Pollyanna’s approach is different, but they shoot for a similar target. “We essentially just make our hop water,” Pawola says. “We’ll do that standard procedure and then, in the tank, we just add vodka.”
Distilling vodka is inexpensive—“cheaper than it is to make beer,” he says—and this is critical: “It’s cleaner. There’s no fermentation characteristics in vodka, and vodka is odorless and flavorless. We think the taste is better [with vodka].” They also lower the pH with citric acid for crispness, and they mix the final product to be 4.5 percent ABV.
Pawola says they use a blend of hop products and whole hops, topping it off with small amounts of fruit flavors. “The subtle flavor of something like a mango or a tropical element really adds a nice nuance to the hops,” he says.
A Unique Niche
Breweries understand that hard hop waters aren’t going to generate massive revenues, but they’re easy to make and serve a specific customer.
At Pollyanna, Pawola watched a wave of drinkers try it, and many moved on. “There is a really niche crowd that loves it,” he says. “We’ve only been doing distilling for a couple years, so this was another way to introduce the spirit side of things to our beer consumer that we have.”
At Great Notion, Reiter characterizes sales on the initial run as average, but he says the brewery is making some distribution changes and sees more potential for future releases.
Hard hop water is unlikely to become a major category or drive huge sales at your brewery, but if it can fill out your range with more offerings for core customers, it might perform like a solid beer style—not the next IPA, but maybe a nice kölsch or golden ale.
It also gives customers an alternative, and it’s quick and inexpensive to produce. It’s not a magic bullet, but for breweries looking to shore up sagging margins, it could be an easy win.