If it’s Namma Beeru, Aam Aadmi Ale or Santa Ale that you’d rather bring in the New Year with than any of the bottled beer brands, then you are in the select, but growing, company of craft-beer enthusiasts in cities such as Bengaluru, Gurgaon, Delhi, Pune and Mumbai.

For over seven years now, micro-breweries and brewpubs have mushroomed across these cities, gathering a dedicated following for their craft beers. Brewed in the traditional non-mechanised way, craft beer is considered as much a thirst quencher as a work of art.

“Once some customers told me to take back the beer and serve them the latest batch. When I told them this was the latest, they refused saying it was three weeks old and they wanted the beer made that morning,” says Ishan Grover, a master brewer — one of a handful in the country — in charge at Manhattan and Open Tap, two of the 18 microbreweries in Gurgaon. With an MSc in brewing and distilling from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, he started working at the Lemp Brewpub in Gurgaon. “While more and more people have stopped drinking bottled beer and started drinking our brews, it is a tough business. We source hops from Canada, yeast from France... so we have to plan months ahead to ensure our beers are always in stock.”

No glycerine, please

“Most bottled beer manufacturers add a lot of glycerine to ensure the beer doesn’t spoil. Some add so much, that all you taste is the glycerine,” says Naveen Mittal of Gateway Brewing Co, Mumbai. “I realised this was not the only option available to me. I started researching how to make my own brew and realised more than a million people do it around the world. After many hits and misses, I finally set up GBC with my partners in 2011 and it’s been good so far.” One of the early independent brewers in India, Mittal has helped popularise the concept through his site indianbeergeek.com. He did face several legal hassles before he could set up GBC, but today the company supplies craft beer kegs to 22 outlets across Mumbai. “In Mumbai, there is a lot of additional red tape to get through. It took us six months to navigate through all this and finally set up our microbrewery in Dombivili, from where we supply to places across the city,” he says.

Down south in ‘pub city’ Bengaluru, Rolf Marren found his calling in the microbrewery business and went on to set up Brewsky together with four friends. “I had nothing to do with the restaurant or beer business. I’m actually a designer by profession. But I always wanted to be part of something like this, and when a few friends were starting Brewsky, I joined in,” he says. “Bengaluru is a city with a great pub culture and it’s only natural that microbreweries are now becoming a big part of the scene. We also wanted to take Brewsky out of the traditionally hip areas like Indira Nagar and Koramangala, and that’s why we started ours at JP Nagar.

Ale culture

Most of the microbreweries in India are located either in Bengaluru or Gurgaon, with a handful in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and even Chandigarh. At these places, international regulars such as Indian Pale Ale, a variation of hefeweizen or wheat beer, are the crowd favourites. But the brewpubs each have their own specials too. Toit in Bengaluru has a beer for every season — Aam Admi Ale during the mango season, Namma Beeru, a ragi-jaggery beer for the New Year/ harvest season and so on. Like That Only is the speciality at GBC and is described as quintessentially Bombay.

Since Howzatt, the country’s first commercial microbrewery set up shop seven years ago, craft beer has brewed for itself a ₹300-crore market, served by around 45 breweries. With the price of craft beer remaining stable for the last few years, the cheers are all the more resounding. As Mittal says, “We have been deprived for too long, it’s time for the good days to come along.”

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