Selling India Pale Ale to Indians

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.

“The beer industry up until two years ago was more or less a nationalized industry with two suppliers,” said Home.

Over the last several years, however, competition has heated up as the combination of India’s hefty import taxes and the lure of India’s huge population — albeit one filled with vegetarian teetotalers — has inspired some of the world’s leading mass market beer makers to begin brewing and bottling on Indian shores.

The Indian beer industry has been witnessing steady growth of 10 to 17 percent per year over the last decade, with growth accelerating over the past few years. With consumption just topping 170 million cases last year, there’s still a lot of room to grow: India consumes only about five liters of beer per person, compared with 25 liters a head in China and close to 160 liters in the Czech Republic.

The new interest in microbreweries signals that the market may be set for a revolution in quality, as well as quantity.

“There have been a lot of inquiries with the word spreading across the country,” said Sandeep Bhatnagar, who heads Ambicon Consultants. “We have had four or five inquiries from Haryana and we are in the process of setting up these microbreweries now.”

Gurgaon’s upwardly mobile consumers are proving to be a lucrative market, according to one new brew pub. “People are liking the beer,” said Amit Dwivedi, pub manager at Rockman’s Beer Island, a Gurgaon pub set up in in collaboration with the Lowenbrau Buttenheim of Germany. “A lot of foreigners are coming. We have a tie-up with the German embassy, and we have a lot of corporate clients. A lot of Indians are coming also.” Dwivedi said the bar and restaurant combined attract about 400 customers a day, 350 of whom sample the beer.

That said, only a precious handful of India’s beer drinkers have ever tasted anything other than lager. Nevertheless, Little Devils forecasts that craft beers can take the same 10 percent of India’s beer market that they have managed in other countries. The company’s initial goal is to sell 600,000 cases a year, but by 2012 they expect to have ramped up to volume of 4 million cases a year, as they add nine more varieties branded with the marks of a major hotel chain that is yet to be announced, partner breweries and other partner Indian corporations.

“On one side, it’s a challenge, but on the other side you can say it’s a great opportunity because drinkers here have been starved of choice,” Home said.