New sodas bring the hops – without the alcohol

Rather than toasting their love of hops with a few craft beers, six longtime friends have parlayed that enthusiasm into a whole new type of beverage.

Brandon Dawson, Tony Moore, Paul Smiley, Mike Helm, Scott Ryan and David Wolfenberger recently launched Hopwater, a carbonated, non-alcoholic drink made with all-natural ingredients, notably hops and cane sugar. They've launched the brand with four flagship flavors – original, lime, grapefruit and ginger – sold in 12-ounce bottles. Each has 48 calories and a 48 IBU (International Bitterness Units, a measure of a beer's bitterness from the hops used to brew it).

The partners, who have offices in Oakley, see their soda as a natural fit with today's booming craft beer market.

"The craft beer culture has made this flavor profile something people like and are familiar with," Smiley said of the drinks, which have a slight bitterness from the Zeus hops used to create them.

As the inventor of the drinks themselves, Moore is responsible for that flavor profile. A flavor chemist with Flavor Producers in Blue Ash, he has decades of experience creating flavors, mainly for alcoholic and natural/organic beverages.

For Hopwater, which he started developing about a year ago, he begins with the hop flower, extracting essential oil to give the drinks their floral aroma. He then extracts the alpha acid, which he turns into three isoalpha acids. Those are blended back into a separate tincture for each flavor. The tinctures are sent to a bottling plant in Boston, where they're mixed with water and cane sugar.

Moore likens it to a "more adult" soda – less sweet, and drier.

Though they hope Hopwater will appeal to the growing number of craft beer fans, its creation wasn't a matter of opportunism, they say.

"This isn't hops as a gimmick," said Dawson, who serves as CEO of the friends' development company, 48th Parallel, Inc. (That's a latitude at which hops grow particularly well.) "This is a hop-forward, faithful representation of hops from people who love them.

"It came down to making something we would like ourselves," he added. "With the craft beers right now, there's such an emphasis on high ABV beers."

That makes it hard to drink those beers one after the other, he said. He sees Hopwater as a way to drink hops throughout the day, to hydrate between beers and to mix in cocktails and mocktails, potentially as a quinine-free substitute for tonic water. The company plans to launch a hop tonic soon, and to add delivery systems such as fountain or tap as an alternative to bottles.

Dawson also thinks craft soda could be the next big thing.

"The beverage industry is saying that craft soda is poised to take off like craft beer within the next five years," he said. "It's the same ethos," with more attention to formulation and production. PepsiCo even launched its own craft soda, Caleb's Kola, last fall.

And they do see an opportunity to grow Hopwater via the craft culture currently surrounding food and drink. That movement has food and drink enthusiasts, from bartenders and restaurant owners to consumers, finding something they like and then sharing it.

"We're basically trusting the craft community to grab hold of it and help us spread the word," Dawson said.

It's already happening: People are stopping them on the streets, such as the bar worker who spotted Dawson and Smiley in their branded T-shirts outside Park + Vine Monday morning. He wanted to ask about getting the soda into his bar.

Park + Vine was the first place to carry Hopwater, where it debuted about a month ago. It's currently available at about a half-dozen other spots around town. But that should change soon: The company has just tapped Cavalier Distributing to get the soda into local accounts. Dawson said consumers can expect to see it popping up in bars and restaurants this month, and in more retail locations in June. (The suggested retail price is $5.99 per four pack or $1.75 per bottle.) From there, he hopes it will be available throughout the rest of Ohio within three to four months and go national next year, if all goes well.

He and his partners took that into account when developing Hopwater's branding.

"We're a beverage startup, but we're also creating what we hope will be a national brand," Dawson said.

To that end, they created a Zeus icon – they call him "Hopman" – that graces the bottles and four-pack carriers. Each of the latter tells a different story involving the carrier. The partners hope the branding will catch customers' eyes from the shelf.

Of course, Zeus also represents the type of hops used. That was a pragmatic choice: The hops are available year-round, their flavor profile lends itself to different flavors and the hops are in less demand than other varieties, so they aren't competing with craft breweries to get them, Dawson said.

Moore plans to use different hop varietals, as well as other flavors, to create future sodas that could be one-off or seasonal offerings. (Check out the brand's website for rejected flavors, including such gems as creamed corn, ketchup and lint.)

And he'll count on the help from his friends, now his partners. After all, when he came up with the idea, he realized that his longtime group of friends from the local music world – he has known many of them for closer to 20 years – had all of the skills he needed to build a successful brand. Their backgrounds span across art, marketing, illustration, video, history, planning, writing and communications.

"The six of us have come up with something that we couldn't have come up with without any one of us," Dawson said.

"I can look at each bottle or four pack, and all of my friends are there," Moore added.