Ito En’s Bet on a New Category: “Alcohol Alternatives”
On October 19, 2026, Japanese beverage giant Ito En began test-marketing a new product called “CHASER BREWING” at select retailers in the greater Tokyo area. What makes it notable isn’t just the product itself — it’s the positioning. Rather than calling it a “non-alcoholic beer” that mimics the taste of alcohol, Ito En is framing it as something new entirely: an “alcohol alternative.”
The lineup comes in two flavors: “JAPAN HORIZON,” a green tea and hop blend with a fruity profile, and “INDIA SUNSET,” a black tea and hop blend with tropical notes. Both come in 350ml cans priced at ¥200 before tax, with playful animal illustrations on the packaging that evoke craft beer branding rather than typical soft drinks.
The product comes out of a new-category development team Ito En formed in May 2024. The motivation was straightforward: younger consumers, especially Gen Z, are drinking less, and many simply don’t like the taste of alcohol. Rather than trying to replicate that taste, the team built on Ito En’s core strength — tea — and asked what it would take to make a satisfying alternative drink from there.
This is the first time Ito En has used hops as a primary ingredient in a beverage. The team reportedly narrowed down roughly 200 hop varieties to about 20 during development. The reasoning behind using hops at all is pretty specific: carbonation tends to make tea’s natural astringency stand out in an unpleasant way, and hop bitterness helps balance that out. The team also pointed to a gap in the existing non-alcoholic drink market — a lack of what they call “drinking satisfaction,” something CHASER BREWING is explicitly trying to address.
For now, this is a small-scale test at select retailers in the Tokyo area, but Ito En has its eye on a nationwide rollout by 2027, with plans to eventually place the product in alcohol beverage aisles alongside non-alcoholic options — a first for the company.
Hop Water: America Got Here First
What’s striking is how closely Ito En’s move echoes something that’s been building in the U.S. for several years: hop water.
Hop water is sparkling water infused with hop aroma — no brewing process, no calories, just the scent and light bitterness of hops in a non-alcoholic carbonated drink. According to scan data from NIQ analyzed by 3Tier Beverages, off-premise sales grew 20% year-over-year in the 52 weeks ending December 28, 2024. Sales spike notably in January — up 48% year-over-year that month in particular, likely tied to Dry January.
Some of the category’s best-known names include:
One brand worth a closer look is Lagunitas’ Hoppy Refresher. The brewing team had reportedly been prototyping non-alcoholic drinks for about eight years before launch, and the recipe has barely changed since. That’s a meaningfully different story from most of the newer, more “functional-drink” style hop waters — Hoppy Refresher leans hard into being an extension of actual brewing craft rather than a wellness product. The flavor lineup — citrus, blood orange, passionfruit, lemon berry — leads with aroma first, built around the idea that “craft” means hop character, full stop.
The branding strategy stands out too. While most non-alcoholic products build their messaging around Dry January, Lagunitas took a different angle entirely with “Wet January” — emphasizing freedom to choose whether, or how much, to drink, rather than framing abstinence as the goal. The brand has also deliberately narrowed its audience to “beer fans who sometimes want to cut back,” rather than trying to win over general sparkling-water shoppers, and it’s typically stocked in the same cooler as non-alcoholic craft beer rather than the water aisle — a clear statement that this is part of beer culture, not separate from it.
What’s interesting across the category is how many of these brands come directly from craft breweries. With the craft beer market shrinking, breweries have found themselves with spare production capacity, and hop water offers a relatively low-cost way to put it to use. Allagash Brewing and Partake Brewing have taken similar routes, positioning their hop waters less as “beer replacements” and more as refreshing daytime sparkling drinks.
Even in the U.S., though, hop water hasn’t quite settled into its own category yet. Retailers still haven’t fully decided whether it belongs near sparkling water or near non-alcoholic craft beer — and for now, it’s most often shelved with the latter.
What’s Different, What’s the Same
Put Ito En’s CHASER BREWING next to America’s hop water side by side, and the first thing that jumps out is just how different the base drink is. The American approach starts simple — sparkling water scented with hops. Ito En instead built on tea, green and black, using hop bitterness to counteract the astringency that carbonation tends to bring out. It’s a very Japanese-tea-company way of solving the problem.
The players involved are different too. In the U.S., it’s often craft breweries extending their own expertise — Lagunitas, for instance, leaning on eight years of in-house experimentation. Ito En, on the other hand, is a beverage giant building an entirely new category from scratch, leaning on its tea-extraction know-how instead. Different tools, same instinct: lean on what you’re already good at.
Underneath it all, though, the core problem being solved is nearly identical. In both countries, the starting point was the same complaint — existing non-alcoholic beers and soft drinks just weren’t cutting it. The U.S. went looking for something that isn’t trying to be a beer substitute at all; Japan went looking for something that deliberately doesn’t try to taste like alcohol. Different roads, same conclusion: neither market thought the existing categories could solve this on their own.
The target audience lines up too. Just as U.S. hop water sales spike around Dry January, Ito En’s own development story points squarely at Gen Z’s drift away from drinking. What’s interesting, though, is Lagunitas’ “Wet January” angle — a looser, less abstinence-focused way of talking about the same shift. That kind of messaging, which doesn’t assume not-drinking is the whole point, might be worth watching as Japanese brands think about how to talk about this category going forward.
Hops: From Beer Ingredient to Drink in Its Own Right
Hops used to be just something you put in beer for aroma. But between America’s hop water boom and Ito En’s CHASER BREWING, it’s starting to look like hops are becoming the star of a drink category all their own.
Ito En is still only testing the waters — literally — and the U.S. hop water scene hasn’t even settled on which aisle it belongs in yet. Both markets are clearly still figuring this out. At ANY HOUR, we’ll be keeping an eye on where CHASER BREWING goes next, along with the continued growth of brands like Lagunitas’ Hoppy Refresher.
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