Travel + Leisure - India & South Asia
THE NEW SPIRIT OF GOA
When he moved to Goa post the lockdown in 2020, RANJAN PAL chanced upon a growing number of gin entrepreneurs keen to utilise Indian botanicals and innovate. He takes us on a tasting tour.
A rising number of entrepreneurs are experimenting with Indian botanicals to make craft gin in the sunshine state.
GOA HAS ALWAYS been famous for its parties, but lately, it is coming into its own as a spirits producer. In fact, several new gin distilleries seem to have sprouted overnight. It’s not surprising that these businesses have chosen to set up base in Goa. The destination is a great test market because of the constant inflow of tourists from all over India.
While Paul John Single Malt Whisky (pauljohnwhisky. com) put Goa on the map in 2012 and DesmondJi’s
Agave India (desmondji.com) has been a pioneer in agave and mahua spirits, the first movers in gin are just three years old. Traditionally, gin accounts for less than one per cent of the annual 300-million-case spirits market in India. Now, a revolution is brewing. Not one of the founders profiled here is above 35, so it seems to be a domain of the youth. This, too, is not surprising. Of all the spirits, gin lends itself most to experimentation because there is no fixed recipe or method. In fact, it is not uncommon for a new entrant to test up to 150 botanicals before settling on eight or 10!
THE EUREKA MOMENT
When I meet Anand Virmani, the soft-spoken CEO and co-founder of Nao Spirits & Beverages (naospirits. com), he is standing next to a Hungary-made 1,000-litre copper pot still fondly christened ‘Agatha’ at Blue Ocean distilleries. Virmani and his team hold the distinction of launching India’s first homegrown craft gin, Greater Than London Dry Gin, in September 2017. His eureka moment came after meeting gin makers in London. “All these guys were sourcing a large majority of their botanicals from India—spices that are available in every home kitchen [here]—and yet we had no decent gin to call our own!” he says.
From that moment Virmani embarked on a quest to produce a London Dry Gin in India that could compete with the best in the UK (hence the cheeky ‘Greater Than’ branding). He was mentored by Anne Brock, the legendary master distiller for Bombay Sapphire. Their moment of triumph came when Greater Than became the first Indian gin to be recognised by The Gin Guild (theginguild. com) in 2017 and won a Silver Medal on debut at the San Francisco World Spirit Awards 2018. The main botanicals in the gin are juniper (from Macedonia), angelica root (Germany), orris root (Italy), orange peel (Spain), and coriander seeds, fennel, chamomile, ginger, and lemongrass from India. Its taste is dominated by juniper, with fresh lemon peel on the nose and a zing of ginger on the finish. In just over three years, Greater Than has seen explosive growth and sold 6,48,000 bottles worldwide.
Not content to bask in these laurels, Virmani launched Hapusa Himalayan
Dry Gin in June 2018 in India, UK, and Singapore; it’s the first craft gin to use allIndian botanicals. Hapusa is the Sanskrit word for juniper, the key gin botanical that is sourced from the Himalayas. The other ingredients include coriander seeds, ginger, cardamom, almond, gondhoraj, turmeric, and raw mango, with the last two giving Hapusa its unique flavour profile. The gin won a Double Gold medal at SIP Awards 2020 and has sold 1,64,400 bottles worldwide. In October 2020, Virmani went a step further and launched Juniper Bomb, which tastes like Greater Than on steroids—it has almost three times the amount of juniper.
MYTHS AND MYSTICAL FLAVOURS
Stranger and Sons (strangerandsons.com) sounds like a troupe of three bad guys who ride into town in a spaghetti western. But, in fact, it features one woman and
two men: Sakshi Saigal, her husband Rahul Mehra, and her second cousin Vidur Gupta. The trio always knew they didn’t want to make the next London Dry Gin. They wanted to make a bold statement about new India. Their choice of botanicals reflects that: it starts with the classic juniper, coriander seeds, citrus peel mix, and angelica root, but then veers off towards uncharted territory with black pepper, nutmeg, cassia bark, liquorice, and mace. This results in a bold, robust, and spicy flavour, which purists might disapprove of, but Stranger and Sons is laughing all the way to the bank—it sold 1,50,000 bottles in FY 2019-2020, its first full year of operation.
The founders like to have fun with their brand identity. Gupta laughs as he recalls their branding conundrum, “We knew that we were not into the conventional elephants and peacocks, but we couldn’t agree on what else!” In the end their creature turned out to be a mythical two-tailed, three-eyed tiger “who chanced upon juniper berries hidden in the secret pocket of a sari blouse in the jungles of the Western Ghats.” True to this story, their distillery is named Third Eye Distillery. While the end product is an entirely Indian one, the process by which it is made relies on a carefully selected set of global components: the robotic electric still made of stainless steel came out of a DIY box imported from the Netherlands, the label has been designed by an Argentinean they met on Instagram, the stylish bottles are imported from Italy, and the corks come from Portugal.
AN UPHILL CLIMB
When I first heard of Pumori, I was ecstatic. After all I had once stood in the shadow of the beautiful “daughter of Everest” and gazed at her mother flanked by sisters Nuptse and Lhotse incandescent in the alpenglow. It was an inspired choice of name for a gin.
Aptly, Fullarton Distilleries (fullarton distilleries.com) occupies a scenic hilly spot in Candepar. A smiling Aman Thadani, creator of Pumori, strides down the slope to meet me, his lanky frame reminding me that he was once a professional dancer. Back in his boardroom, he explains the name as being a tribute to the mountains from which the Himalayan juniper comes,
and then rattles off a list of 11 other ingredients, including rosemary, aniseed, cinnamon, and vanilla.
A family-owned enterprise, Fullarton Distilleries was founded in 2013, and its success as an export-oriented enterprise enabled it to experiment at the premium end of the domestic market. Internally, Thadani championed the effort to produce Pumori and faced many challenges from skeptical old hands. “It was like climbing my own personal Pumori!” he says. Launched in July 2020, into the headwinds of the pandemic, this exciting new gin has sold just over 12,500 bottles in the key markets of Goa and Maharashtra. In terms of flavour profile, Pumori strikes me as more nuanced than the classic London Dry Gin, probably because the botanicals are more balanced instead of being dominated by juniper and coriander. The bottle design is influenced by the canteens that were carried by the great explorers of the 19th century, and the label artwork harks back to the old-school method of making gin with botanicals being added to a handmade still.
YOUNG & FEARLESS
The newest kid on the gin block (and the youngest at 26) is Aditya Aggarwal. When I meet him, he is hunched over his still peering through its small circular windows like Captain Nemo scanning for land through a periscope on the Nautilus. Fascinated by the idea of an alcohol brand driven by storytelling, he created Samsara (which translates to ‘an endless circle of life and death’), a citrusy floral gin representative of contemporary India. During the lockdown, he spent days and nights mixing various botanicals and distilling gin in a mini still in his Delhi home kitchen. Aggarwal remembers his mother’s vexed reaction to the experiments, “Every day he starts drinking at 5 pm, and if anyone stops him, he says ‘I’m working’!”
Aggarwal’s love for science fiction reflects in his company name, Spaceman Spirits Lab (spacemanspiritslab.com), and in the fantastical backstory of his gin: Lady Samsara journeys across the universe before alighting on a secret botanical garden (in Goa, of course), where a wizard is distilling the elixir of life. Back in the real world, I discover the elixir contains, besides the usual suspects, hemp seeds, vetiver grass, cubeb berries, and rose petals. All in all, it is the most floral of the gins I have tasted. Since its launch in October 2020, Samsara has sold 48,000 bottles in Goa and Maharashtra, so the new kid on the block is off to a strong start.