Finding Solutions for Today’s Brewing Challenges

What happens when you move beyond pellets?

The numbers facing independent craft brewers right now aren’t easy to read. Volume is down across the category. Energy costs have risen over 43% since 2020 and are projected to climb a further 25–40% by 2030. Hop contracts signed in more optimistic times are sitting heavily on balance sheets. And consumer behaviour is shifting in ways that don’t favour standing still.

At TNS, we work with brewers at the centre of this pressure every day. The conversation usually starts with one problem. It rarely ends there.

This year at CBC in Philadelphia, we brought that conversation to life in our Beverage Innovation Lounge. We introduced Sal, a fictional brewmaster at a craft brewery under real pressure. His story represents the challenges we hear from brewers every week. Declining margins. Inefficient processes. Hop contracts that no longer reflect production reality. And a growing question: where does a brewery go when creating great beer alone isn’t enough?

We used Sal to tell the story of many brewers. We used the event to showcase solutions.

The yield problem

Dry hopping is one of the most loss-inducing processes in modern craft brewing. For heavily dry-hopped styles, it’s not unusual to lose 10–12% of a batch to hop absorption and trub. That’s beer you’ve paid to brew that never reaches a glass.

The solution we poured: 100% dry-hop replacement.

Sal replaced 50% of his pellet additions with TNS extracts, using HopAlpha® for precise bitterness control and HopBurst® for full dry-hop replacement and aroma. Efficiency gains were immediate and significant. Fewer pellets, no freezer storage, a two-year ambient shelf life, and a brew that hit all markers on flavour and aroma.

Across trials we’ve conducted with breweries transitioning from pellet to liquid hop additions, we’ve consistently seen yield improvements of around 10%. For a mid-sized regional brewery running heavily dry-hopped brands at volume, that’s a sizeable amount of recoverable revenue.

The flavour question

The art and craft of brewing draw people to it. The science at the core – yeast, water, grain, hops – each one a living system with its own chemistry, each one capable of producing something extraordinary when handled with skill and knowledge. Hops in particular carry a complexity that still surprises even the most experienced brewers. Iso-alpha acids deliver bitterness. Terpenes, thiols, and esters build aroma. Dry hop additions coax out character that couldn’t exist any other way.

Liquid hop extracts don’t replace that craft. They extend it.

The chemistry is the same. The compounds are the same. What changes is how the brewer works with them. Rather than bitterness, flavour, and aroma arriving as fixed outputs of a single pellet addition, each can be addressed independently – dialled in, repeated, and refined with a level of control that the pellet format simply doesn’t allow.

The brewer’s instinct still drives every decision. The knowledge of what a hop varietal brings, when to add it, how it interacts with the grain bill and the yeast – none of that changes. What changes is the range of expression available. In that sense, moving to liquid hop extracts feels, to many of the brewers we work with, less like a departure from the craft and more like an addition to it.

What the hop can really do

The most significant opportunity that liquid hop technology opens is what becomes possible when hop functionality is no longer constrained to the physical limitations of whole hops or pellets.

Non-alcoholic beer is the clearest example. The segment has grown 175% and the consumer demand behind it isn’t slowing. The challenge most brewers face in non-alc development is a familiar one – the worty, sweet character that persists when fermentation is arrested or reversed, and the absence of the body, balance, and aroma that a standard fermentation provides. In a pellet-dependent process, there is no clean way to put that back.

HopZero® changes that. A modular toolkit of 100% hop-derived fractions, each targeting a specific sensory gap: mid-palate weight and mouthfeel, residual sweetness, aldehyde-driven worty off-notes, and hop top note restoration. Fractions can be used individually or in combination and dosed post-fermentation, with no process changes required. The result is a cleaner, fuller, more balanced beer.

We told Sal’s story of his struggle to brew a non-alc beer and poured a 0.5% beer built on 100% hop-derived mouthfeel modulation – showcasing an understanding of the hop at the compound level, with separated, targeted fractions, applied with a precision that the pellet format, by its nature, can never deliver.

We also poured something that had nothing to do with beer.

Consumers aren’t drinking less. They’re drinking differently. The better-for-you soft drink segment is a $44 billion category growing at nearly 5% annually. Breweries have the capacity, the flavour knowledge, and the craft credentials to compete in it. What they’ve often lacked is the development capability to get there.

That’s where ADM comes in

Working with ADM’s product development team, we poured Eldo Hop Pop – a hop-forward craft soda built on El Dorado hops from CLS Farms in the Yakima Valley, with Pacific Northwest fruit flavours of strawberry, plum, and pear. A second variant followed: peach and guava. Functional concepts rounded out the range – Hop to Sleep, a lavender lemonade featuring Cascade hops, magnesium, and tart cherry juice, coloured naturally using ADM’s Colours from Nature portfolio. And Rise and Revive, a Cascade hop rehydration drink built on coconut water, electrolytes, zinc, orange, and black cherry.

They’re what a brewery becomes when it starts asking bigger questions.

The conversation continues

CBC is one week. The challenges Sal faced – and the ones we hear from brewers every day – don’t have an expiry date. Whether you’re looking at yield improvement, non-alc development, functional beverage innovation, or simply want to understand what moving beyond pellets could mean for your operation, we’re ready to have that conversation.