Young `brewpreneurs' set off India's craft beer revolution

A few months ago, on a rooftop in Koregaon Park in Pune, Sameer Patwardhan, co-founder of Kothrud-based Kimaya Brewing, hosted an Indian Pale Ale tasting session for a group of about 10 where he introduced a Cold IPA, which is brewed with lager yeasts rather than ale and at colder temperatures.

Along the way, Mr Patwardhan took pains to debunk myths about IPA, including the belief that IPAs were first brewed for India (Australia, in case you want to know). His tasting session in February was held just before the Deep Dive Beer Fest, the three-day craft beer festival held at regular intervals by Great State Aleworks (GSA) at the Great State Dive in the city.

 Whether you prefer the old-fashioned NEIPA (or New England IPA style that relies on hops for aroma and is more juicy than bitter) or are happy to experiment with Cold IPAs and kokum-flavoured beers, there’s no doubt that India’s craft beer entrepreneurs have created a new set of drinkers.

Maharashtra leads the way

When it comes to craft beer, Maharashtra leads the pack,  both in terms of having a passionate set of “brewpreneurs” and user-friendly government policies. It’s among the few states that permit kegging (where microbreweries can send their beer in kegs to other bars) and takeaways in growlers (plastic or aluminium one-litre bottles). The state government recently introduced laws that permit beer from its microbreweries to be exported abroad.

Nakul Bhonsle, founder of Pune’s GSA who conceptualised Deep Dive, explains that although craft beer volumes in Pune are a fraction of Bengaluru, the ecosystem has been fuelled by conducive policies and a host of beer festivals. Deep Dive, which had technical and brand sessions for brewers and pub owners, was followed by the two-day Poona Brew Out, a much larger festival, with sessions open to the public.

Going `doodally'

The beer scene in India has evolved considerably since 2006 when Suketu Talekar and Prateek Chaturvedi set up Doolally Craft Beers in Pune, one of the earliest microbreweries, inspired by Singapore’s Brewerkz. It had required years of work to get Maharashtra’s liquor licensing policy rewritten to allow the setting up of microbreweries. At that time, it seemed like an impossible plan—but Mr Talekar and Mr Chaturvedi were in the right place for it, and named their brand appropriately.

Back in the days of the Raj, the British set up a mental asylum in the bucolic town of Deolali, near Nashik, corrupting the name to Doolally, and eventually using the term ‘going Doolally’ for someone who was mentally ill. Doolally’s founders were far from ‘doolally’ though—the laws they got drafted in Maharashtra formed a template for Haryana’s policy, which beat them to the opening. 

India's first microbrewery 

Howzzat at Gurugram’s Galaxy Hotel now lays the claim to being India’s first microbrewery. Gurugram, unfortunately, didn’t make the most of its first brewer advantage and the craft beer scene has languished. It’s a telling indictment that the best fresh beer available in Gurugram is from the taprooms of giants like Brew Dog and Bira 91.

India’s OG draught beer capital, Bengaluru was quick to seize the opportunity to become  India’s microbrewery capital. With Bengaluru being India’s Silicon Valley, some of the leading microbreweries were set up by those escaping tech—from Toit’s Sibi Venkataraju to Geist’s Narayan Manepally and Windmills’ Ajay Nagarajan. Microbreweries and their close cousins, taprooms, have not looked back and now account for 80-90% share of the country’s craft beer industry. The craft beer industry was estimated at around ₹ 1,000 crore in 2022.

Small cities join in the fun 

Although the lion’s share of microbreweries is in Bengaluru, Gurugram, Hyderabad and Pune, what’s interesting is their spread to smaller cities--like Visakhapatnam, Puducherry, and Shillong. 

Apart from microbreweries being an extremely profitable business, with India’s larger ones clocking up to ₹ 100 crore in annual sales (40% of which is revenue from beer), what is also driving the growth is the fact that craft beer has got the attention of a rare breed of entrepreneurs who are geeks at heart, and committed to perfecting brewing. Many like Gautam Gandhi from Delhi’s Fort City and Navin Mittal of Mumbai’s Gateway Brewing started as prolific home brewers.

Navin Mittal, who founded Gateway Brewing Co. in Mumbai in 2011, explains that craft beer means different things to the consumer and the brewer. For the consumer, craft beer has come to mean “fresh beer”, not bottled or brewed miles away and trucked to the bar. For the brewer, “craft is about the passion for flavours, tastes and textures that you can create in beer”. Ajay Nagarajan, an engineer-turned-entrepreneur who set up Windmills Craftworks in Bengaluru in 2011, says craft vs bottled is “the difference between freshly squeezed orange juice and that from a pack”.

This is why craft beer isn’t retailed much in India, apart from the onerous and expensive procedure of registering a fresh label for every new beer. “Our cost of production is 3-4 times that of commercial beer, but we’re taxed at the same rate as they are. It’s almost as if we’re being penalised for wanting to make good beer,” a Goa brewer says. In India, beer is not taxed by its strength or ABV (alcohol by volume), a prime reason for strong lagers accounting for 70% of the overall beer market. By all conventional logic, if beer was taxed by strength, we’d see a move towards healthier consumption with an emphasis not on strength but on taste and flavour.

Cashew, mango, millets 

At Deep Dive, you can taste Cashew Sour brewed by Great State Aleworks, unusually tart and made from cashew feni. As they say in beer parlance, it’s “sessionable”. It’s a beer that points to the rising trend of using local ingredients. Mango is a popular ingredient for ale, and in the west of India, kokum too. The use of local ingredients is a great way to introduce an unfamiliar beer style to a consumer through a familiar flavour. Millet Ale uses local grains such as millet. The use of bajra and local varieties of rice is also on the rise. At Terra Mayaa in Guwahati, they make a lovely, fragrant Joha Kazi Lager, joha being a local strain of rice and kazi a local lemon.

                                                   (By arrangement with livemint.com)