I love the concept of hop water, but don’t like the concept of tying up a keg or tap handle on my keezer. After some searching, I found a recipe to make hop flavor concentrate that can then be mixed with sparkling water. I’m fairly happy with it, and will be trying a few other versions. It’s a surprisingly small amount of hops (~0.2 oz), so I’m definitely going to experiment with larger quantities to see what happens. Even so, this first iteration is pretty tasty.
Full recipe and commentary are on my beer blog: Hop Water v1.0 | Andy's Brewing Blog
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Thanks for posting and the link Andy. I was thinking of starting a thread about this as I want to try making it too. My wife and I don’t drink alcohol most of the week and are always looking for tasty alternatives. Our go too is soda water with bitters and lime or lemon juice. I have had some very good hop waters but they cost just about the same as craft beer, which is BS given the lack of malt and the difference in the amount of labor.
I will skip the sugar. We both have a low tolerance for sweet drinks. For instance we make gin and tonics with soda water and quinine tincture because even tonic is too sweet for us. Cider and mead must be bone dry.
I am curious about your pour over method. i was expecting a steep. Have you tried that and found it too bitter?
Thanks, Pete! Wow, you do like your stuff bone-dry…the sugar doesn’t really come through in this version (it’s a tiny amount), and the original recipe author said it’s to prevent things from being too harshly bitter. I would bet you can safely leave it out. We’re a “lower sugar” family–for our tonic recipe, we still have sugar in it but it’s about half of what the original recipe called for.
This was my first time making hop water, so I haven’t tried a steep. That’s probably next on my list, as I play with the recipe a bit. I also want to try it with a greater quantity of hops (5 g / 0.2 oz is a tiny amount, and other recipes call for 1 or 2 oz. per gallon). I might do a cold water steep with more hops, in hopes it will result in more hop flavor but minimal astringency.
At Hop and Brew School last year, we were shown several extracts that YCH is developing to make hop water.
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That’s cool! I’m interested to see how (or if) they’ll manifest at the homebrew level. I personally like the manual exercise of making this stuff from pellets, but if extracts for hop water open up new markets and make DIY projects more accessible for a broader audience, I’m all in favor!
You’ll hear about it in the next episode, but I just did a tasting with Abstrax hop extracts and you could little just dose that stuff into sparkling water with no changes and get a pretty reasonble hop water for no work.
Fascinating! I’m curious about the dosing on that…at $89/4 oz., it’s a bit pricey, but perhaps it would avoid some of the pitfalls (and time) of pellet hops, and perhaps the cost is more reasonable if the required dose/12 oz. sparkling water is small enough.
I shall look forward to the episode!
The manufacturer’s dose in beer is 1ml Abstrax and 1 oz of hops per 5 gallons of beer for an optimal blend of flavors.
When we did it in seltzer for testing purposes, we added 0.1ml per quart. So each 5ml bottle on MoreBeer ($20) would yield 12.5 gallons of seltzer.
Hey, now I don’t have to listen to the podcast…(just kidding).
Thanks for that info – I had only been looking on the Abstrax website, and the 5 mL bottles aren’t available there individually. That size is definitely more tempting (and affordable) as an option…
particularly once you know that once opened, the bottles have a time line. (I think it’s a year in the fridge after opening)
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Friend from the club makes hop water all the time. He pushes CO2 through a jar full of dissolved pellets, into cold water inside the fermenter. It’s really good.
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