Dry Drinking

I wrote this story about three female founders of NA beverage companies for Oregon Business Magazine.

When Marla and Liam Hoban were living in a small German village outside of Nuremberg, they noticed something curious at the local gasthaus. 

“Nonalcoholic beer was presented just like regular beer. It was served in a nice big glass,” Marla says. “What was fascinating to us was seeing folks seamlessly switch between alcoholic and nonalcoholic. You’d be at a table of people, and you didn’t know who was drinking alcohol. They’re just coming back with beers.” 

At the time, they both worked for Adidas. When they returned to their hometown of Portland in 2013 they thought it was strange that Oregon didn’t have a nonalcoholic brewery. “We kept thinking, ‘Why has nobody done this?’ We are in this state that’s known for craft beer. We were honestly baffled that no one had opened a nonalcoholic brewery yet,” she says. 

Initial conversations with local breweries led nowhere. It wasn’t until a year or so into the pandemic, when people started reevaluating their work-life balance — and drinking habits — that their idea took root. At that point, the couple was working for Nike — Marla as brand director and Liam as a product director for global football apparel. Marla left her job with Nike at the end of 2019, which freed up time to work on this new venture. In 2021 the couple struck up a collaboration with Sarah Masoni and Mike Adams at OSU’s Food Innovation Center to begin working on a recipe. Roaming Nobles was born, becoming Oregon’s first dedicated NA brewery. 

Marla Hoban with a four-pack of Roaming Nobles nonalcoholic brew [PHOTO: Jason E. Kaplan]

It’s no secret that (alcoholic) beer consumption in America is declining: Last year was the first in two decades that more craft breweries closed than opened. The one silver lining? Nonalcoholic beer. This sector, led by large companies like Athletic, saw sales grow by 30% last year, according to the Brewers Association. 

Indeed, the entire nonalcoholic beverage sector is booming. According to survey data published by the market research firm NC Solutions, 49% of American adults say they’re trying to drink less. The same firm reports that 19% of adults between the ages of 21 and 28 — that is, the segment of Generation Z that’s old enough to drink — does not drink any alcohol, and more than half of Gen Z-ers over 21 expressed interest in trying a nonalcoholic drink in the near future. Gone are the days when the only person at a dinner party not drinking alcohol was either pregnant, taking antibiotics or a now-sober alcoholic. While beer and wine sales plummet nationwide, nonalcoholic beverages have been the third-fastest-growing beverage category in the United States for the past two years, according to Numerator. And not just during Dry January. Consumers — also driven by fitness and wellness goals — are more sober-curious than ever. 

Marla calls the trend she spotted in Germany over a decade ago “alcohol fluid.” At the time, this behavior — sometimes having a drink, sometimes opting for a nonalcoholic version, even in the space of one evening — was unusual here in the states. 

“But now I think everyone is experimenting with their relationship to alcohol,” she says. 

In Portland a handful of new craft nonalcoholic beverage companies are meeting the consumer where she’s at. All three happen to be led by women. 

A Temperant Tonic

Faith Dionne, a former pastry chef at Higgins Restaurant, is no stranger to the alcohol industry. After starting — and then selling — the bean-to-bar chocolate company Bees & Beans, she launched crafts distiller Jaz Spirits. But after having some health scares — she had 11 skin cancer lesions removed in four years — she decided to change course. A longtime forager, she had always seen Jaz Spirits as a vehicle for wild-foraged native plants like salal berries and spruce tips. That these ingredients were preserved in alcohol was somewhat arbitrary.

“There is a clean, clear line from alcohol to cancer. There just is,” says Dionne. “And so as I’m getting surgery after surgery, biopsy after biopsy, and I’m making liquor, I was like, ‘No. This does not feel right.’” As she cast about for her next project, Dionne grew introspective. What is it that she savors about craft spirits and other alcoholic beverages?

She realized it’s the mouthfeel and engagement as she drinks them. 

“It’s evaporative and it’s engaging different parts of your palate at different times,” she says. She’d long enjoyed tonic water — the quinine has a cleansing, bitter taste that lifts the palate. Yet there were few craft tonic waters in the U.S. There’s Blake Lively’s Betty Buzz and Q, but both are sweetened with agave, which some consumers don’t like. Fever-Tree, made in the U.K., is the tonic water of choice among U.S. bartenders.

“I realized that there’s space for more expression in tonic,” she says.

But it wasn’t until a German machine that prints cans digitally became accessible to small businesses in the Portland area that Dionne founded Dappled. (This technology avoids the use of paper labels, which make cans impossible to recycle.) She contracted with a local company that had the machine, and then she had to find access to a unique canning line that allows for a higher level of carbonation than most lines for beer, cider or kombucha do. Dionne is insistent about having a high carbonation level for her tonic water, which measures about 3.4%. “Without the high carbonation level, [tonic water] just falls flat,” she says. “It doesn’t have the same mobility in the mouth.” 

Faith Dionne, founder of Dappled Tonic, photographed at AVP Wine Collective, a facility Dappled uses for packaging and storage, in Southeast Portland. [Photo by Jason E. Kaplan]

So far Dappled has three flavors: aromatic (flavored with cardamom, vanilla andlemongrass), citrus (yuzu, lemon and lime), and floral (rose, chamomile and lavender). Since April 2024, the cans have been carried by Market of Choice; this past March, New Seasons began selling them too. Dionne says a half-dozen out-of-state shops have also begun ordering Dappled—many of them booze-free bottle shops. “They’re reaching out from Florida and New Jersey and Boston and Chicago,” she says. 

Market research that she and her crew have conducted at grocery demos and other consumer-facing events has revealed that a full 40% of Dappled customers are buying it to drink on its own rather than as a mixer. “That was stunning to me,” Dionne says. “They’re looking at it as a standalone craft beverage, which was our intention. But it feels so good that it’s actually working!” 

The Hops Heartland 

When Victoria Pustynsky moved to Oregon a decade ago, she worked briefly in the wine industry before realizing that there was a great business opportunity in creating a cannabis-based beverage. It was 2015, and recreational cannabis had just been legalized statewide. Her initial idea was to offer a low-dose apéritif with 2.5 to 5mg of THC. But this was shot down by some in the industry, who favored cannabis-infused beverages spiked with massive amounts of the intoxicating cannabinoid. She found that irresponsible. She chose, instead, to create a CBD-based beverage. In 2017 she founded Aurora Elixirs.

“We were pretty early on with capturing this idea that people wanted something that was participatory but not intoxicating,” Pustynsky says. “They wanted to feel something that’s relaxing — but also kind of a ritual that you can wind down with at the end of the day.” 

But even with CBD, a nonintoxicating cannabinoid, there were a lot of regulatory hurdles like banking and payment processing. She and her team started exploring other nervine herbs like ashwagandha. They stumbled upon hops as an ingredient. 

“It was so tasty. It was herbal and piney and super citrusy!” she says. Hops and cannabis are part of the same family and use the same extraction method, too, so the move to hops wasn’t super challenging logistically. In early 2021, just a year into the pandemic, she launched Aurora Hops in a 330ml amber-glass bottle in two flavors: pomelo sage (with Citra hops) and yuzu orange blossom with peppercorns (with Citra and Mosaic hops). 

Early press was extremely positive: In summer of 2022, the New York Times’ Wirecutter included it in a roundup of the best nonalcoholic drinks. Bi-rite, the high-end San Francisco grocer, was Aurora’s biggest customer. 

But because of the Aurora name, there remained confusion about whether or not the hops version of Aurora had CBD. (It didn’t.) In the summer of 2022, Pustynsky repositioned the hops drink as Lolo Hops and started packaging it in cans, introducing a third flavor: Cascadia Field Blend, which uses Chinook, Mosaic and Ekuanot hops. (Aurora Elixirs, the CBD-infused beverage, is a separate line with different branding.)

Pustynsky says that the adult non–alcoholic beverage space went from nonexistent to being a giant category in the space of a few years. It’s gotten more competitive, she says, and consumers have grown more sophisticated. “I think the consumers’ understanding is changing,” she says. 

Victoria Pustynsky, founder of Lolo Hops, photographed at the co-packing facility, Galactic Unicorn Packaging, where she brews her products in Southeast Portland. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan

To that end, Pustynsky says that though Lolo Hops contains hops, she wouldn’t call it a hop water, per se. “Ours is slightly sweet and has a very different taste profile,” she says. “It’s not just straight hops.” In addition to having a little sugar, Lolo Hops is also sparkling. When she describes it to consumers or journalists, she calls it a botanical soft drink. 

“I think it’s closer to a Casamara Club—or what they call a leisure soda,” she says. (Casamara Club is an amaro-infused NA beverage made in Detroit.) 

Locally, Lolo Hops is sold at New Seasons, Market of Choice and Wellspent Market. It’s also on tap at Bauman’s on Oak and occasionally at Loyal Legion and other bars around town. Though it doesn’t have the budget for marketing, Lolo Hops has been served at most of the bars at Pickathon for years, and this is how many Portlanders first encounter the beverage. Some online customers order 10 cases a month, says Pustynsky. “Once people try it, they love it,” she says. 

“We have a lot of opportunity with the Lolo brand,” she says. “And I’m leaning into the Pacific Northwest provenance. This area is the hops heartland.” 

A Flavor-Packed NA Beer 

Marla Hoban at Roaming Nobles eventually found a partner with Steeplejack Brewing Co., based in Hillsboro. She reached out to Steeplejack because she liked that it had a female lead brewer, Anna Buxton. She was further impressed when co-owner Brody Day returned her message within half an hour. 

“Brody and Anna were both so supportive,” says Hoban. “They saw the vision of where we were going early on.” As Roaming Nobles grew, the initial recipe that came out of the Food Innovation Center had to be tweaked,  which is often the case as businesses scale. Anna has continuously evolved the Pilsner. And Hoban tapped brewer Sean Burke — formerly of the Commons and Von Ebert, and co-founder of ForeLand — to update the recipe for Roaming Nobles’ flagship IPA. (He suggested adding Mosaic hops.) The new version will be in stores by fall. Burke was also behind the brand’s recent seasonal launch: a West Coast IPA with notes of guava and stone fruit. (It contains CTZ, Citra, Krush and Strata Indie hops.) The West Coast IPA sold out, so Hoban has made it part of the company’s year-round line of flagship beers. 

One thing that distinguishes Roaming Nobles from most large national NA breweries is that they brew the beer in a traditional manner and then halt fermentation before the alcohol gets above .5%. (By law, NA beverages must contain less than .5% alcohol.) Many national NA breweries make an alcoholic beer and then de-alcoholize it — either using a spinning machine or boiling it off in a vacuum. (Others, like Athletic, do neither of these things and tightly guard their process.) Without revealing Roaming Nobles’ exact process, Hoban says, “I would say that time and temperature are everything.” She acknowledges that hundreds of batches need to be thrown out until you dial in the perfect time and temperature. “You almost have to think of it as part of your innovation costs,” she says. Hoban is also committed to sustainability: The brand uses digitally printed cans (easier to recycle) and compostable toppers that can be tossed in the green compost bin.

Hoban, whose dad was a microbiologist, makes sure to pasteurize her beer so that it remains shelf stable. (With the presence of yeast and sugars but no alcohol, you have to or it could quickly spoil.) This adds to the cost and time to get the beer to market, but the beer maintains its integrity and flavor.  

Roaming Nobles has many fans in the Portland restaurant industry. Foremost among them is chef Gabriel Rucker, who has been sober for 12 years. (The beer is available at both Le Pigeon and Canard.) Rucker, who is on a tasting panel for Roaming Nobles, says that its pils is “the perfect beer for me.” 

“Their beers are all very refreshing. They are all, to me, great summer outside beers,” he says. Perhaps more importantly, Roaming Nobles’ beers go well with food. “If I have a can of Roaming Nobles on the table, it’s going to be delicious with anything that comes out of the kitchen,” he says. 

You can also find the beer at Belmont Station, New Seasons and John’s Marketplace. At press time, Hoban said she was hoping to entertain a strategic partner or investor in the brand to help it grow. 

“People are thirsty for something that treats them like sophisticated consumers,” Dionne of Dappled Tonic says. In one way or another, that’s what these three women have been able to do—offer sophisticated NA beverages right at a time when the number of Americans who are sober-curious has ricocheted to new heights. Hoban recalls that just two years ago, most Portland breweries and restaurants would carry just one NA option. “But now we’ve gone from the kids’ menu to the blackboard!’” Hoban says.of NA beverage companies for Oregon Business Magazine in the fall issue.