The Queen has Spoken: How BeePop is making waves with its fermented green tea drinks

The Queen’s Choice Awards returned for the 2026 season to welcome fresh, fun brands into the hive and to recognize and celebrate their innovative and boundary-pushing uses for honey. This year’s winners incorporate honey across confections, frozen foods, beverages and beyond to create inspiring, delicious products that drive the conversation around nature’s favorite sweetener.

As the award-winning QCA 2026 beverage, BeePop
is making waves with its fermented green tea drinks that combine fiber, fruit juice and honey into sparkling treats with summery flavors. BeePop owner and CEO Matthew Bine weighs in on the importance of honey in its fruit beverages, while director of production operations and head brewer Scott Hedeen dives into the role honey plays in the fermentation process to achieve that signature BeePop taste.

Congratulations on your recognition! What does this mean to you?

Receiving the Queen’s Choice Award is incredibly meaningful because it validates the mission behind BeePop: creating a genuinely enjoyable, better-for-you beverage made with real honey and fruit.

The idea began in mid-2024 when my friend Scott, an experienced brewer, visited my honey business, Georgia Honey Farm. Almost immediately, he said, “you should be making a beverage with this honey.” That simple comment sparked everything.

Because many people choose honey as a more natural alternative to conventional sweeteners, I knew from the beginning that we had an opportunity to create something thoughtful and distinctive — something that tasted great while using ingredients people could feel good about.

Why is honey an integral part of BeePop formulas? What does it add to the drinking experience?

Honey does much more than sweeten BeePop. It adds depth, a smooth mouthfeel and a delicate floral character that helps round out the fruit flavors.

Honey integrates naturally into BeePop’s light, subtly sweet flavor profile. It gives the beverage a distinctive taste that feels both familiar and elevated without becoming overly sweet.

Honey also reinforces our real-ingredient story. It is the ingredient that connects BeePop to our roots at Georgia Honey Farm and makes the drinking experience uniquely ours.

Since honey is naturally fermentable, can you speak to the process of creating BeePop beverages with honey?

Honey plays two important roles in our process. During the early stages, it provides fermentable sugars that support the cultures involved in developing our base beverage. Later, during blending, we use carefully selected honeys in smaller amounts to complement each flavor and fine-tune its sweetness, aroma, body and finish.

Honey is sweet, but it also brings a unique density, mouthfeel and subtle earthy character. Those qualities add depth to the finished beverage in a way that ordinary liquid sweeteners cannot.

Because honey is naturally fermentable, we carefully control the finished product to preserve the flavor and carbonation we intended. We use a precisely controlled pasteurization step to stabilize the beverage before distribution. This prevents continued fermentation from creating excess pressure in the can or making the drink more acidic over time.

There are many steps between our brewery and the customer’s refrigerator, so consistency and stability are extremely important. We want every can of BeePop to taste exactly the way we intended.

With its prebiotic qualities, do you recommend BeePop beverages to any particular customers?

We created it for people who want a flavorful, lower-sugar alternative to conventional soda without feeling as though they’re drinking something medicinal.

From the beginning, our internal goal was to make BeePop “crushable” — light, refreshing and enjoyable enough to become someone’s everyday beverage of choice. We intentionally avoided making it excessively sweet or loading it with so much fiber that it would become difficult to enjoy regularly.

BeePop includes a small amount of added fiber, along with electrolytes, to complement an active, everyday lifestyle. One of our favorite times to enjoy it is around 3 p.m., when you want something refreshing and interesting to carry you through the rest of the day without a heavy dose of sugar or late-afternoon caffeine.

Any new BeePop flavors to watch out for in the future?

Honey gives us a beautiful canvas for flavor development. We’re always exploring varieties that consumers love and that naturally complement our most important ingredient: real honey.

We’re especially excited about Wildberry, which is currently in development. Our newest release, Peach, celebrates our Georgia roots and one of the flavors most closely associated with our home state.

BeePop is proudly hand-brewed, which means we’re intentional about every stage of the process and conscientious about every ingredient we use. That hands-on approach gives us the ability to refine each recipe carefully and create a beverage we’re genuinely proud to share — one made with care, quality, and real ingredients.

In the spirit of summer, are there any mocktail inspos made with BeePop that we should try out?

Absolutely. BeePop is designed to be delicious straight from the can, but it also makes an easy, sophisticated, alcohol-free base for summer drinks.

Our simplest summer serve is BeePop poured over ice with a squeeze of fresh lemon or lime and a fruit or herb garnish. It feels elevated without requiring syrups or a long list of ingredients.

BeePop Peach Summer Spritz

Pour BeePop Peach over ice and add:

• A squeeze of fresh lemon

• 2-3 fresh peach slices

• A few mint leaves

• A splash of sparkling water, if desired

BeePop Wildberry Cooler

When Wildberry launches, try it over ice with:

• Fresh lime juice

• A few lightly muddled berries

• A basil or mint garnish

• A splash of sparkling water

The idea is to keep the drinks simple and refreshing so the fruit and honey remain the stars. BeePop can “scratch the itch” for a thoughtfully-crafted drink during the week without relying on alcohol or overly-sugary mixers.

While waiting for the Wildberry release, shop other BeePop products and learn more about the science behind BeePop beverages.

The buzz is always about made-with-honey products. Interested in putting your product on the table for the 2027 Queen’s Choice Awards? Email alison@honey.com today.

Trending Products

.