A man selects a bottle of beer inside a shop selling alcohol in the northeastern Indian city of Siliguri, Aug. 19, 2008. Indian beer is manufactured with inferior malt and malt-substitutes like rice flakes, but now an upstart company is trying to introduce India Pale Ale in the country that made it famous. (Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters)

Selling India Pale Ale to Indians

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How the subcontinent got its beer back.

By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: August 12, 2009 06:26 ET

NEW DELHI — Ask Indians about the British, and they'll tell you the colonizers built a cracking railway, created an impregnable bureaucracy and educated a class of English-speaking toffs to man it.

But ask about the greatest feat of Great Britain's imperial adventure in India — the invention of India Pale Ale — and all you'll get is blank stares.

Not for long.

Posh Indians have begun to discover the art of craft beers, as daring returnee importers, ambitious entrepreneurs and this country's answer to America's Boston Beer Company have introduced exotic wheat beers, ales and pilseners to discerning middle class drinkers.

Fighting strict, volume production-oriented licensing laws and a culture that frowns on booze, India's first two brew pubs have opened in Gurgaon — a mushrooming forest of malls and high rises just outside Delhi — and the trend is poised to take off in other states soon,
according to brewing equipment sellers.

The most exciting development for Indian beer lovers, however, is not brew pubs, but the
recent launch of Little Devils beer by an upstart called TVB Craft Breweries.

The reason: Along with a wheat beer, a craft lager, a strong ale and a golden ale, TVB has finally brought the beer brewed and named for India — India Pale Ale, or IPA, as it is known by beer lovers around the world — back to the country that first made it famous.

“Indians don't even realize that it's named after India,” boomed David Home, TVB's Australian chairman, in a recent interview at the company's New Delhi marketing office. “This is the first time that it's being brewed in India for 70 years. People love that.”

Like many inventions, India Pale Ale was discovered more or less by accident.

As the story goes, in the late 18th century London brewer George Hodgson — commonly known as the creator of IPA — sent a shipment of his October Bitter Ale to India, only to see it run into rough weather around the Cape of Good Hope. The delay caused the ale to mature more rapidly than normal in the casks. The strong, hops-flavored ale that resulted soon became the most popular tipple in the colony known as “the jewel in the crown.”

In the 1820s, Asia's first brewery, started in the town of Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, by a Brit named Edward Dyer, pioneered the brewing of IPA in India with Lion — a brew marketed with the slogan “as good as back home!” But by the 1960s, the company, now known as Mohan Meakin, had, like most of the world's breweries, converted to lager. Since that time, if you happen to be a fan of good-tasting beer, things have only gotten worse.

India's alcohol market is governed by arcane rules designed to encourage local production and discourage consumption, so distillers and brewers here never had to worry excessively about quality. A handful of brewers enjoyed a near monopoly, with the result that Indian beer is manufactured with inferior malt and malt-substitutes like rice flakes — as well as a syrupy preservative called glycerine. It's not uncommon for two bottles of the same brand of
Indian beer to taste completely different from one another.

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Posted by david wayne osedach on August 12, 2009 08:59 ET

Good for them! I hope they makeenough to export and I'll try a bottle. What's next? India Scotch whiskey?

Posted by Jason Overdorf on August 12, 2009 20:02 ET

Believe it or not, David, yes. See my article on Amrut Distilleries--India's first maker of single malt Scotch. Weirdly enough, they don't have a license to sell it in India yet, but it's won accolades in export markets, including the UK.

Posted by Rohit on August 13, 2009 23:16 ET

During my journey from Chandigarh to Simla, I often used to see this brand name "Mohan Meakin", written in big letters, on the way in solan. Before reading this article I never knew that this was Asia's first brewery.

Posted by edsilva on August 16, 2009 09:59 ET

Great article, Jason. I wondered why India produced such mediocre beers. I used to think it was the poor quality of water. Thanks to you I now understand it is the low-quality hops used in the production. I detest the glycerine added in the beer to give it froth. Again, I wasn't aware of this foreign material in the beer, until a Dutch colleague pointed that out. I am glad the India Pale Ale is coming to India. I will make it a point to buy a bottle once I am back in Bombay from my travels. This week I tasted Kirin and Sapporo beers; they were great. Now if we can only convince the Japanese to brew their beers in India!

Posted by hair_2_play on August 17, 2009 12:10 ET

Jason:

Your article brought back so many memories. I spent the first 28 years of my life in India and didn't really know of any beer other than lager. And really bad lager at that. I probably drank the worst of the lot thanks to easy access to cheap booze from the Indian Army. My Army connection made me very popular amongst my friends though :). And talking about glycerin, we used to use a technique of inverting a bottle of beer into a full glass of water because it supposedly caused the glycerin to 'flow' out. Don't know about the scientific veracity of this but it is a rite of passage for students.

Its only after I came to the US that I really 'discovered' beer, although I fail to see how Budweiser can really qualify as one. Its the microbreweries and small, independent breweries that are the real 'beer heros' here. I remember taking a 6 pack of my then favorite brew, Fat Tire (since been replaced Sierra Nevada) with me on a visit home and my friends just hated it! A red beer! Its was almost an insult. it it ain't golden yellow, it ain't beer.So on trips back home, I have since resigned myself to chugging Kingfisher, a glycerin laden, pathetic excuse for beer and occassionally Fosters, the beer that Australians (and I) laugh at. So this article sure does bring a cheer (!) to the heart. My in-laws happen to live in Gurgaon, so I'm already looking forward to my next trip back home.

Thanks for making my day Jason.

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