Hike Hopped Seltzer Elevates The NA Beverage Shelf By Making Hops The Star

What’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear the ingredient, “hops?”

Well, hops can be used for much more than just brewing beer. The plant is on a trajectory of commercial reinvention, largely in other types of beverages.

A leader in the space is Ryan Coleman, founder of Hike Hopped Seltzer. Coleman has been enamored with the plant for years, beyond its presence in a hoppy beer. Even when his negative relationship with beer led him to keep alcohol at a distance, he brought hops in closer.

“That journey meant completely throwing away a big chunk of my life that involved drinking and starting from scratch,” Coleman tells me. Nonalcoholic beers tasted too similar to its alcoholic counterparts, so he set out to create a beverage where he could have fun with something he loves while maintaining his sobriety

“Why not just make something that is still super interesting to taste but doesn’t remind you of the old stuff?” he says.

Hike’s initial intention was to help Coleman himself. But as its presence expands, it taps into much more.

Sobering Up

“Craft beer was my thing…super high proof IPAs,” Coleman says.

During the pandemic, Coleman realized his dependency on beer became unhealthy. “The guardrails were off,” he says. Once becoming a dad, he decided to get sober. “It was very hard and really humbling.”

Nonalcoholic beers are gaining traction for their incredible resemblance to alcoholic ones. In fact, Athletic Brewing, the nonalcoholic beer company, is the top-selling beer, alcoholic or otherwise, at Whole Foods Market. Coleman got the memo and gave them a try. They resembled alcoholic beer so precisely to the point where they just were not a good fit for his particular journey. “I would think that I was [getting drunk]

and then that would just cause me to feel even weirder,” he says. “Then I’d go back to drinking again.”

Beyond his relationship with beer, Coleman has known more about hops than most, given that his family members have grown them in the past, selling them to local breweries in Virginia. He remembers pulling hops off of the vine and dunking them into beer to make them hoppier.

While browsing the NA set, he was looking for an option with exactly that hoppy aroma instead of the overall beer flavor. “This one specific part of the beer drinking experience, which is aromatic, sort of bitter, sort of earthy, gr***y–it’s just wildly appealing.”

Even hop seltzers on the shelf didn’t match what he was looking for, which was simply a crisp, bubbly seltzer with those earthy aromas; he found every option to be too sweet or too similar to beer. Coleman bought some equipment to do it himself, and would play around in his home kitchen with all different varieties of hops.

He channeled much of his culinary background working in kitchens of many restaurants to find the perfect balance of hops and flavor. “What I wanted to find was something that had the most approachable characteristics,” Coleman says. “I was thinking, ‘I know there’s a way that you could make this so that people who don’t like beer would like it.’”

The Hops Plant

Hops are a member of the cannabis family, but they do not contain any THC or CBD; they don’t get you high. There are some functional benefits of hops given all of the polyphenols they contain, but really, they’re used for flavor and aroma.

Coleman sources hop extract from Washington State’s Yakima Valley Hops, a subsidiary of Haas, the largest hops supplier in the world. “Kind of like grapes, hops take on elements of where they’re grown so they have discernible differences,” says Kaleb Schwecke, Chief Marketing Officer at Yakima Valley Hops. “[The Yakima Valley has] ample irrigation coming out of the snow melt in the Cascades, so even though we’re in a desert, we still have ample water supply.”

Incredibly diverse and complex, hops, although most widely ***ociated with beer, can be applied in a wide variety of products. “Everything from ethanol production to diapers,” Schwecke says. “Hops were used for their bitter potential to balance out the sweetness of all the malt that goes into beer…They started using hops for their aroma and flavor–that’s where you get IPAs,” he continues. “And now that advances even further into alternative beverages for their maximum flavor potential.”

There are thousands of varieties of hops grown around the world, about 100 of which are used commercially. “The cones look different between varieties…that’s where all the alpha acids and

the oils and all those aroma compounds are found,” Schwecke explains. “Everything from citrus to sweet fruit…flowers, spices, cream…and some smell like whiskey.” Citra hops, with tropical and citrus notes, are the most commonly found hops today, including in Hike’s original variety.

Coleman chooses the types of hops with the profiles of each flavor to pair them with intention.

“I’m always looking for a palatable, bright tropical hop that has aromatic and flavor qualities similar to the fruit that you might want to put in there,” he says. He often refers to Hike as “Sprindrift with hops,” given the fresh fruit juice he adds for each different flavor, which currently includes Grapefruit and Maracuyá (Spanish for p***ionfruit). “I’ve been obsessed with flavors and how combinations of flavors work.” Coleman says. He plans to extend his line of hop seltzers with future flavors like Sudachi Squirt, Green Tea Watermelon, Yuzu Ginger and Finger Lime (aka lime caviar). “I want to give an homage to different cultures.”

Marketing To The ‘4th Category’

Hike positions itself differently than each of its competitors. HOP WTR, on track to become the leader in the hop water category (according to Nielsen IQ data), typically sits in the seltzer aisle alongside La Croix and Polar, whereas Hike markets itself more as a nonalcoholic beverage, sitting alongside Lagunitas Hoppy Refresher and Sierra Nevada Hop Splash. And among those, Hike is one of the only hop seltzers that’s actually a brand of hop seltzers and not just a line extension by a beer conglomerate.

“We had already talked to the big national brands, but at Whole Foods, it’s really important to us to also meet with the regional people who maybe just want to get into five, ten stores. It’s all the same to us,” says Samatha Fletcher, Category Manager for ‘4th Category’ of adult beverages at Whole Foods Market, a new position at the nation’s leading natural grocer, highlighting the growth of this category, which includes ready-to-drink ***tails, hard seltzers and nonalcoholic beverages. “The fact that [Coleman] was doing a non-alc seltzer that was branding himself to intentionally be carried in adult beverage as a non-alc item, really checked all the boxes.”

In addition to traditional retail, Coleman doubles down on his brand by also selling Hike in alternative spaces like music venues and skate parks. Targeting this niche community in the early years of his business helps tell the story of Hike. It was important for him to have a presence in these communities, which he felt could use a nonalcoholic alternative. This led to his first major retail accounts at Total Wine & More and Trader Joe’s.

Hike entered Whole Foods Market stores in Virginia in the Spring of 2025, and Fletcher has high hopes for the brand. “He’s telling me the story…and I tried it and I was like…just sign me up,” she says. “If they want to stay small, they can. If they want to go big, they will.”

So long as the visibility of hop seltzers increases, there’s the potential for a larger market than nonalcoholic beer. “If you’re driving in your car drinking an NA beer…at a kid’s baseball game…at your office fridge at work…it points to something problematic if you’re searching for that flavor profile at that time,” Coleman says. “[Hike is] a completely harmless beverage with an interesting taste profile that’s not overwhelming. It seemed to me, whether it’s true or not, that you could probably sell more of them because people would keep them in the fridge as an any-time beverage.”

There are many positive ***ociations with the word ‘hike.’ “Not hike, like to take a hike,” Coleman says, “but a new version of that word, of forging your own path, moving ahead. Maybe not on a trail, but just moving forward…to elevate, pull yourself up.”

On Hike’s website, Coleman created a tab called “You good?” which he describes as a “stream of consciousness” that he wrote to share his sobriety experience with others who also may be struggling. “Every time I think about taking it out, I get some person reaching out saying how it spoke to them,” he says. “That’s what this is about…this is bigger than just creating a beverage business.”