Hip Pop Review: The Manchester Kombucha That Earned a Permanent Spot in Our Fridge
Published July 2026 · 6-minute read · by Rich, founder of Unhopped
We spend most of our time here reviewing alcohol-free beer — but nobody drinks beer for every occasion, and the ‘what else?’ question deserves honest answers too. So here’s the first non-beer review on Unhopped, and it’s a brand I’d recommend without an affiliate link in sight: Hip Pop. This is a personal favourite, and I’ll explain exactly why.
Heads up: this page contains affiliate links to Hip Pop. If you buy through them we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We were fans (and paying customers) long before we were partners. Read our full disclosure.
From a kitchen in Altrincham to the UK’s fastest-growing soft drink
Hip Pop’s origin story is the good kind of unglamorous. In 2019, Emma Thackray started fermenting small-batch kombucha in her kitchen to help her friend and co-founder Kenny Goodman with his IBS. He loved it; the pair took it to farmers’ markets around Manchester and Cheshire (alongside homemade sauerkraut and kimchi, in the early ‘Booch & Brew’ days), then built a micro-brewery on a National Trust farm on the Cheshire–Manchester border and won a Great Taste Award in their first year of trading.
The rise since has been remarkable: a spot on Sainsbury’s Future Brands programme in 2023, listings in M&S, Waitrose, Co-op, Morrisons and Ocado, meal-deal placements, and recognition as the UK’s fastest-growing carbonated soft drinks brand — from a bootstrapped, working-class-founded Manchester business with no wealthy backers. They even landed a Hollywood tie-in, with Supergirl gracing special-edition cans. It’s a genuinely likeable company doing genuinely well.
What the drinks are actually like
The range splits into kombuchas (fermented tea — think Ginger & Yuzu, Strawberry & Pineapple, Apple & Elderflower, Berries & Cherries) and gut-friendly sodas in flavours like Peach and Pink Grapefruit. Everything is low in sugar and low calorie without artificial sweeteners — a rarer combination than it should be, achieved through slow recipe development rather than sucralose — and it’s all vegan, made with real fruit and live cultures (the brand adds Bacillus coagulans cultures to every can).
If traditional kombucha has ever scared you off with its vinegary bite, Hip Pop’s house style is deliberately gentler — less acidic, more sessionable, with a clean, tangy freshness. From this fridge: the Ginger & Yuzu kombucha is the standout, and the sodas are what a soft drink should have been all along. They pour beautifully into a beer glass or over ice, which matters more than it sounds when you’re not drinking.
Try the Kombucha Mixed Case at Hip Pop →More of a soda person? The other half of the range is the one to start with: the soda mixed case bundles all four fizz flavours — brewed with real fruit and added fibre, still no artificial sweeteners — and it’s the easiest way to convert anyone who thinks ‘healthier soft drink’ means ‘worse soft drink’.
Try the Soda Mixed Case at Hip Pop →Why it belongs on an alcohol-free beer site
Because the second drink of the evening is a real problem. One or two great alcohol-free beers is a pleasure; three can be a lot of malt. Kombucha’s gentle tang and complexity make it the natural next glass — adult, interesting, nothing like a sugary soft drink — and Hip Pop’s cans sit as happily at a barbecue or in a pub garden as any 0.0%. It’s also only a trace-alcohol ferment, in the same territory as the kombucha category generally — comparable to the levels in alcohol-free beer itself.
The CBD kombucha, factually
Hip Pop also makes a CBD kombucha range — the same fermented base infused with CBD. We’ll keep this strictly factual: CBD is legal to sell in the UK as a food ingredient, these are 18+ products, and we make no claims about what CBD does — UK advertising rules rightly prohibit health claims, and the honest position is that you should do your own reading. If you’re CBD-curious, it exists, it tastes like the rest of the range, and the mixed case is the sampler.
Try the CBD Kombucha Mixed Case at Hip Pop →The honest scorecard
The good: genuinely low sugar without sweeteners; real fermentation and live cultures; flavours that are interesting rather than gimmicky; a likeable independent Manchester story; widely stocked if you’d rather try a single can from a supermarket meal deal first. The caveats: it’s pricier than mass-market soft drinks (real ingredients cost more); kombucha’s tang isn’t for everyone even in this gentler style; and if you want conclusive scientific proof of kombucha’s benefits, the research is still young — the brand itself is refreshingly honest about that, which is partly why we trust them.
Where it fits in your fridge
Our honest suggestion: a mixed case alongside your beer order. Beer for the beer moments, Hip Pop for the second glass, the lunchtime, the driving-later evening. If you’re doing Dry January it’s close to essential kit — variety is what keeps an alcohol-free month enjoyable rather than endured. And if beer’s the mission, our Beer Finder and Crate Builder have you covered.