How to make Hop Flavoured Water is relatively simple and worth the effort. The low and no-alcohol trend is growing in popularity. If you love those hoppy flavours as a home brew & craft beer enthusiast, you’ll love Hop Water.
Hops must be boiled to release their bitterness, but you can achieve a hop flavour and aroma without the boil. Depending on the bitterness, flavour and aroma you are looking for, vary your approach to making Hop Soda. Hop soda is hop-infused carbonated water. Geterbrewed stock a huge range of hops & some really innovative hop tea bags which are perfect for making Hop Soda Water.
To create a stable product, we recommend you boil the water used for a short period. It takes around 5-10 mins to sterilise the water. Once the water is sterilised, you can check the pH level of the water using a pH Meter. If the pH needs to be adjusted, you can use Phosphoric Acid or some household lemon or lime juice. The water chemistry should also be considered if you want to make a product with an excellent mouthfeel.
Adjust PH
The pH scale runs from 0-14, with zero being super acidic and 14 being super alkaline. UK water regulations will give a pH range of safe drinking water between 6.5-9.5, with ph water purity at 7. The issue with this is you will never get the perfect 7pH. Various bottled water will have different pH to give a different flavour. Therefore, the mineral content must be addressed before adding the hop flavour.
The perfect pH for extracting hop flavours plays a role in the finished hop-flavoured soda. The pH level in finished beer is usually between 4.2-4.5pH, which gives the desired drinkability. Obviously, there are sour beers that could be as low as 3.2pH or similar. If we get the pH wrong in the water, we run the risk of extracting undesirable flavours from the hops.
Methods to try
Non-alcoholic, gluten-free and zero-calorie, the guilt-free Soda! There is a growing demand for health drinks similar to Kombucha and Sparkling Hop Teas. Let’s look at ways to create some easy-to-follow hop water recipes.
- Hop Tea – Use a base of your favourite tea or green tea and add hops to give some extra bitterness, flavour and aroma. The hops can be added at tea brewing temperatures to extract some bitterness and release the isomerised alpha acids or added just before you cool the tea before carbonating for an extra hit of hop aroma.
- Hop Soda – Use a base of boiled and cooled water that has been infused with a hop pellet addition & force carbonated in a SodaStream
- Sparkling Hop Water – You can do the hop steep, add some sugar and yeast to the water and allow the water to carbonate naturally, creating low alcohol volumes. When carbonating beer in a bottle with 500ml using a level teaspoon of dextrose monohydrate, it can add 0.5% of alcohol.
- Hop Water – Using a cold steep method with hop pellets in water, testing it as you go to achieve the desired hop flavour and aroma and then carbonating.
If you’re interested to learn more, then check out our youtube channel where the team experiment with different hop water-making techniques