Beer replacement of the Week: HOP WTR kinda rules, if we're being honest
Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage (or food) that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
I wasn't interested in hop water. Don't get me wrong; as a 40 year old stereotype who writes about beer, I love pale ales. But hops and carbonated water, together without malt or alcohol? That sounded like a bitter voyage to a pointless land far away.
My one friend who swears by it drinks Lagunitas' Hoppy Refresher, which introduced the beverage to my radar. But he also eats at McDonald's four times a week, so he's also not exactly trustworthy in that arena. So yes, I went hop-less, instead opting for non-alcoholic beers when I wanted a drink, but none of the negative effects that came with it.
While Athletic Brewing has filled that niche, it does leave room for improvement. Mainly, their booze-less brews are lower calorie than their real thing counterpart, but still clock in between 45 and 90 calories per can. And since my metabolism stinks (see above), cutting back on that seemed like a good idea.
Enter, HOP WTR's mix-pack of, uh, hop water. HOP WTR offers flavors beyond piney hops in standard hard seltzer flavors; lime, mango and blood orange. Huh, OK, the last one's a little unusual, but still. The question now is whether these zero calorie cans can be the beer replacement I'm looking for, or if they'll just taste like someone turned a pine forest into a case of La Croix.
Original: B
This pours with an effervescent and quickly fizzling head. Wooo, this guy kinda stinks. It's got a definite decorative soap vibe coming off the top.
That potpourri feeling lingers into the first sip which is... gross? Great? It's weird in a good way, a beverage that isn't quite a beer and isn't quite a soda. The bitterness you'd normally associate with hops is replaced by a low-key sweetness beyond what you'd get in a seltzer. It's soft and smooth and floral and, again, a little weird.
It's refreshing, with a tiny hint of berry sweetness clocking in toward the end. I can't testify to the adaptogens or nootropics within -- I feel pretty much the same -- but this is a useful beer replacement that lacks the unappealing stale malt of non-alcoholic drinks. Particularly at zero calories.
Blood Orange: B+
This smells considerably better than the original, those some soapy/potpourri remnants remain. There's a lot of citrus up top and I'm hopeful that will intertwine nicely with the hop flavor inside.
It is, indeed, much more pleasant than the original hop water. The orange isn't overpowering or syrupy sweet. It is soft but has considerably more flavor than a La Croix. The hops are gentle, adding a little organic feel without crashing through with bitterness.
Adding a splash of fruit flavor makes this significantly more appealing. I like hoppy beers, but the straight-up hops in HOP WTR were a bit too floral for me without the balancing factor of malt. Turns out a bit of orange can fix that. This is a crushable summer drink that brings just enough beer flavor to make you think you're drinking something stronger.
Lime: B
In the spirit of using these as a no-calorie beer replacement, I'm cracking this one at the pool on a Monday afternoon. The smell off the top is unmistakable citric acid, the kind you'd get in a big box hard seltzer. That suggests some familiar, if unpleasant, flavors coming my way.
Fortunately, the first sip doesn't back that up. Yep, there's some acidic lime components, but it's not bready and beady the way the laziest seltzers are. The hops are an important balance here, as they keep that citrus from taking over. The hops aren't beer-y, but slightly bitter with some veggie sweetness involved.
That leaves a bit of a hollow aftertaste behind, the feeling that hops are involved but not quite doing the thing they were put on this earth to do. Which is a bummer, because the journey there is full bodied and crushable. But there's just enough of a lingering sour note -- and an unpleasant burp here and there -- that keep this from being the lights-out beer replacement I want.
But in terms of an NA drink approximating beer, it's pretty good.
Mango: A-
Alright, don't love the finish here. Mangoes are a personal enemy as someone wildly allergic to urushiol. So consider the struggle of cutting one of those guys and compound it with breaking out in a three-week rash if I touch the fruit and don't immediately scrub my body afterward. Not great!
But mango is also a cheat code in terms of artificial flavor. It lends a certain creaminess to the equation without feeling excessively fake. I assume as, again, I hardly eat mango on its own.
This one smells like sweet hops and creamy mango, which is a good start even if it lends that promise of too-vegetive burps down the line. Those two tastes work well together, with the sweetness of the mango working against the bitter of the hops without any tart citrus in the mix. This may not have been the first HOP WTR I would have grabbed from the cooler, but it's the best of the bunch.
The end result is a three-way dance between the creaminess of the mango, crispness of the bubbles and gentle bitterness of the hops. It feels more like an NA cocktail than a beer, which sells it a little short because the NA cocktails I've had have been a bit of a disaster. This, on the other hand, is something I could crush in three minutes on a hot day, easily.
Would I drink it instead of a Hamm's?
This is a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink HOP WTR over a cold can of Hamm’s?
Yeah, if I'm looking to abstain, HOP WTR is pretty much the perfect blend of refreshing, low calorie and beer adjacent. I'll be getting more.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: Beer replacement of the Week: HOP WTR kinda rules, if we're being honest
