A full pour of a jackfruit beer from Kimaya Brewing / Photo courtesy Kimaya Brewing Company
The concept of craft beer was born from the idea of small brewers utilizing regional resources and customs to innovate off tradition and create something wholly new and personal. In India, pioneering independent brewers are now shaping a new craft-beer culture all their own.
WORDS Ruvani de Silva
When considering your next beercation destination, there’s no shortage of possibilities. Perhaps you’re planning to hit up hophead heaven in Southern California, learn all things lager in the Czech Republic or immerse yourself in cask ale in the United Kingdom.
Without doubt, these are all great—and delicious—options, but for serious beer nerds wiling to travel and keen to expand their palates, there’s a new, dynamic and unique scene bubbling up in India that should push it to the top of your beery bucket list.
Across the nearly 1.27 million square miles that make up the heart of the subcontinent, passionate and dedicated brewers are changing up the Indian beer scene by creating brews with hyperlocal ingredients to achieve the magic win-win of making something completely new out of something steeped in local heritage and culture, promoting sustainability simultaneously with drinkability.
From Delhi to Kolkata, Goa to Bengaluru, India’s first generation of craft brewers are not content with resting on the laurels of their American and European counterparts. Instead, they are bringing completely new flavors into the world of beer, brewing up the likes of Karvanda Gose, Jaggery Ale, Indrayani Rice Lager, Kala Namak Jamun Ale and Bajra Beer.
You won’t see these ingredients on the menu at your neighborhood Indian restaurant, as many aren’t found outside their local regions. To source them, brewers are cultivating relationships with nearby farmers, which is also bridging the gap between India’s young, urban craft-beer scene and traditional farming culture.
Tap menu at a Doolally taproom / Photo courtesy Doolally Craft Beers
DRINK LOCAL
For Indian brewers, there are several key factors that drive the imperative to source local. To start with, as the market grows, they desire to stand out in the crowd by producing something different and unusual.
“People are no longer satisfied with mass-produced, one-size-fits-all brews,” says Tresha Guha, chief experience officer at Mumbai’s Doolally Craft Beers. “They crave variety, flavor and authenticity, and local ingredients deliver all that and more.”
Aditya Challa, founder and managing partner at Goa-based Susegado Brewing, agrees. “As the market matures, brewers are looking at interesting new ways to differentiate,” he says. “It’s great fun to experiment with flavors which are familiar to our local market and present these to customers in a new format—beer!”
According to The Restaurant Times by Posist, there are now more than 250 breweries in India, mostly concentrated in the major cities. The tech hub of Bengaluru is at the center of the scene, boasting a mighty 80-plus breweries to date with another 25 in production.
While this might seem like a small number for a nation of nearly 1.5 billion people, the sector is projected to grow by a massive 24.41 percent between 2024–2032, so establishing a foothold as an industry leader will only become more important.
In this regard, using local ingredients that feature in popular dishes has another benefit: attracting new customers who may not be familiar with craft beer but will feel comfortable ordering a drink with flavors they recognize, designed to be paired with familiar local cuisine.
“Using local native ingredients is a great way to connect with our customers who may not be intimately familiar with different global beer styles or understand them,” says Sameer Patwardhan, the cofounder, head brewer and operations lead at Kimaya Brewing Company in Pune.
“Using native ingredients in our beers also make them more approachable because it allows us to frame the concept [of craft beer] to the customer with the local ingredient as a reference point.”
Kokum, a refreshing sweet-sour relative of the mangosteen, is used by Kimaya in their gose as well as a cider. The fruit is popular in sol kadhi, a drink enjoyed by many Indians that mixes the fruit with coconut milk.
“In Pune, we have very hot and dry summers, which is the perfect time for consuming a nice refreshing sour beer—unfortunately sour beers as a whole in India have not really caught on, so to make our sour beers more approachable we decided to make a kokum gose,” explains Patwardhan. The customer response was so positive that Kimaya is now brewing a smoked version as well.
Geist Brewing Co.’s Show Me The Honey / Photo courtesy Geist Brewing Co.
Karvanda Hibiscus Gose from Doolally Craft Beer / Photo courtesy Doolally Craft Beer
EMBRACING FAMILIAR FLAVORS
Doolally, India’s first microbrewery, has made over 30 beers using local ingredients.
“Our brews are planned out so they actually try and celebrate an ingredient and make it the hero of the brew,” says Guha, emphasizing Doolally’s experimental and seasonal approach. “Whether it’s using jaswand [hibiscus] flowers in a salty gose, or jaggery [unrefined sugar made from palm] from Kolhapur in our Jaggery Ale, when it comes to adding fruits, spices, sweeteners and even flowers to our beers, the Indian palate is always keen on seeing these experiments come to life.”
Amar Srivastava, owner and consultant with Ministry of Beer in Delhi and Roadhouzz in Kolkata, likens the scene to “a research and development hub,” where a nascent industry has the opportunity to make its mark through creativity and local specialization.
Familiarity and resonance are also recipe drivers at Geist Brewing, which has three locations around Bengaluru. Their Kala Namak Jamun Ale combines the sweet-tart astringency of jamun berries with the pungent, sour smokiness of kala namak, also known as Himalayan black salt, a common ingredient in chaats, raitas and chutneys. For the Geist team, the key to the success of this flavor combination is its play on nostalgia.
Kimaya Brewing Company beers with local mango / Photo courtesy Kimaya Brewing Company
“This creation was a direct response to our desire to innovate and cater to our customers’ evolving tastes,” explains Geist CEO Narayan Manepally.
“Many of us on the team have grown up eating this combination of jamun fruit and black salt during the summer, and it is often sold on the streets by vendors,” adds Head Brewer Vidya Kubher.
Kubher is also part of Bengaluru’s Ladies Who Lager Women’s Brewing Collective. The group’s Stratosphere Lager was the first in India brewed by an all-female team; Kubher incorporated local aralu popped rice into the recipe as a nod to fried snacks in local Karnataka cuisine.
“Aralu was chosen to introduce a piece of our cultural fabric into the lager, bridging the gap between tradition and modern brewing techniques,” says Kubher.
IN SEARCH OF SUSTAINABILITY
While experimentation, accessibility and brand identity are key to the proliferation of local ingredients in Indian craft beer, there are other significant factors at play. Sustainability is also a major driver.
Shortening the supply chain for brewing ingredients reduces beer’s carbon footprint, critical in one of the world’s most polluted countries. With many traditional brewing ingredients native to Europe and the U.S., finding local alternatives means not only fresher ingredients, but also a reduction in environmental impact from transportation.
Rice grown around Bombay Duck brewery / Photo courtesy Bombay Duck Brewing
Local citrus is sourced in Himalayas Uttarakhand for Bombay Duck Brewing / Photo courtesy Bombay Duck Brewing
Using local producers also helps support India’s farming economy. Among Indian breweries sourcing local, there is a sustained commitment to working with local farmers to improve supply, reduce poverty and support the market for indigenous grain and rice varietals.
Bombay Duck Brewing is located an hour outside Mumbai in the Western Ghat mountain range, amidst small-hold paddy farms. “Rice bhakris [flatbreads] and bhat [boiled rice] are the carb components of each meal around here,” says Head of Marketing and Collaborations Pooja Pangtey while explaining how Bombay Duck’s proximity to local rice varietals inspired them to use the ingredient in their beers.
Bombay Duck began brewing with locally sourced ratna and jaya rices, creating its flagship Rice and Shine Franco-Belgian Farmhouse Ale. “But as we got deeper into this rabbit hole, we also realized that most of the rice grown now is hybrid varieties,” says Pangtey. “The heirloom varieties are like heirloom jewels, but even more precious.”
This led to the creation of the brewery’s Slow Flow beer series, a deep dive into the rare, preserved heirloom grains of the Indian state of Maharashtra, in collaboration with champions of India’s local and ethical food movement The Locavore and OOO Farms, a community farming movement specializing in indigenous grains. So far, the collaboration has released four beers, each time riffing off a classic beer style with an endangered specialty heirloom grain to create a unique flavor profile, including 50 Days Red Poha Marzen, RoyALEty Ajara Ghansal Cream Ale and Paint It Black Stout with Krishna Sal rice.
Geist Head Brewer Vidya Kubher mashing in Stratosphere Lager / Photo courtesy Geist Brewing Co.
“Aralu was chosen to introduce a piece of our cultural fabric into the lager, bridging the gap between tradition and modern brewing techniques.”
Bombay Duck is now also collaborating with Three One Farms, an eight-generation, family-led farming business in Punjab, to source their wheat locally, too.
“By forming direct relationships with farmers and producers, we hope to preserve the regional biodiversity and encourage responsible farming practices to promote a healthy and vibrant local food ecosystem which makes the craft beer business more sustainable in the long run,” says Pangtey.
At Doolally, supporting local farmers is equally important. “When we found out that more than 50 percent of people in India still depend on agriculture for their earnings and half of them earn less than $2 a day, we were unpleasantly surprised,” says Guha. “We decided to do something about it. We joined hands with Reema Sathe, the founder of Happy Roots [an award-winning social enterprise working with marginalized farmers and rural women], and worked with five farmers from the drought-stricken region of Akola to grow cash crops like barley and bajri [pearl millet] that go into our beers.”
This was the first collaboration between Indian farmers and a microbrewery, and India’s first bajri beer, a trend that has taken off, with breweries such as Great State in Pune, Byg Brewski in Bengaluru and Bombay Duck all making beer with this common Indian millet varietal.
TRUE TO THE ROOTS
As much as terroir is now considered a feature in European and American beer, Indian terroir is playing its part in the evolution of the identity of its beer scene. At Kimaya, Patwardhan equates the hyperlocal Maharashtra ingredients he uses, such as red Indrayani rice, Kattu buckwheat and varieties of heirloom black rice with the unique traits of Pilsen’s pilsners, Ireland’s dry stouts and Burton-on-Trent’s IPAs.
Patwardhan, along with his brother and cofounder, learned to brew while studying in the U.S., and is a certified Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) judge, participating in competitions across Asia. He is not alone.
Bombay Duck cofounder Abhishek Chinchalkar and Bengaluru’s Windmills Craftworks CEO Ajay Nagarajan are among many of India’s brewing pioneers who cut their teeth in the U.S. before deciding to bring craft beer culture to India.
Now, instead of following existing American and European trends, these brewers are leading with brand new beer styles, effectively decolonizing the beverage that was brought to India under European colonial rule, giving it its own Indian identity and readying it to present to the rest of the world. Patwardhan aims to bring his beers to the Great American Beer Festival (GABF), while Nagarajan, who also brews with local ingredients, has set up a satellite branch of Windmills in Dallas, Texas.
There is enormous creativity and a huge range of flavor and production potential showcased by these breweries, be it Geist picking up cucumbers from their local farmer
Kimaya Brewing Company’s Buckwheat Citra Ale / Photo courtesy Kimaya Brewing Company
at three in the morning to ensure the freshness of their Cucumber Salt Lager, Susegado buying up all the leftover poee (Goan bread) from their three local bakers every day to make their Poder’s Pilsner, an ode to Goan baking culture, or anything else in between.
By combining industry imperatives such as growth and brand identity with sustainability and economic values, including the support of local farmers, preservation of endangered crops and reduction in environmental impact, brewers in India are building their culture from the ground up as uniquely terroir-driven, incorporating their local and national cuisine and heritage to make beer that is truly Indian and will contribute new dynamics to the global beer scene.
“We’re not just following trends; we’re setting them, with unique flavors, innovative brewing techniques and a commitment to quality that rivals the best in the world,” says Guha. “It is a wonderful time to be a beer drinker in India!”
This article was published in the Summer 2024 issue of Full Pour. Don’t own it? Pick one up today!