Grin & ‘beer’ it!

Craft beers have been around for decades globally, but they flowed much more recently in to the stormy Indian market. And as a segment, craft beer has surely caught the fancy of young millennial beer drinkers in our country. With new craft breweries mushrooming with amazing frequency, it has never been easier in India to savour high-quality, well-made beers from all over the world. But do all of us who love to drive long distances to Gurgaon (for a Delhite like me it is a long distance with Delhi still waiting for microbrewery licenses), Mumbai, Pune or Bengaluru to savour beer from microbreweries, do really understand craft beer? After all, what is craft beer? For starters, it can be intimidating. Whether you are trying to club the dozens of draught and bottled beers as craft beer or just confused about the difference between ales and lagers, rest assured you are not alone! The answer to the question is far more nuanced and interesting than one might expect – and the subject of a raging debate in every part of the world. Most of us think ‘craft beer’ is just a colloquial term applied to especially tasty (and well-crafted) brews. But the Brewers Guild of America has a formal definition to it. To earn the ‘craft’ title, breweries must be three things: it should be small, independent and traditional. No, all these terms are not popular terms to be applied with flexibility. They too fall under the ambit of rigid definitions by the Brewers Guild of America.
To be small, the annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less is required and for being an independent brewery, less than 25 percent of the craft brewery should be owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by a beverage alcohol industry member that is not itself a craft brewer. And for being traditional, it is required that beer flavours should be derived from traditional or innovative brewing ingredients and their fermentation But, in India though there is no such strict definition for craft breweries but almost every craft brewery in India would most probably fall within the purview of this definition. What is most interesting is that a majority of microbreweries in Gurgaon, Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, etc. are created & run by young entrepreneurs like Pratekk Chturvedi ( Ministry of Beer), Piyush Jain(Decode), and Manish Sharma (The Drunken Botanist) among others. Similar is the case with bottled craft beers like White Rhino by Ishan Puri. Despite multiple roadblocks, frustrating red tape and unfriendly policies, these beerpreneurs have realised their dream and are everyday creating new experience/s for craft beer lovers.While there were only two microbreweries in India , in 2008, the numbers have gone up to 170 now, leading to an increase in the sale of craft beers by 20 percent year on. With Delhi soon to issue licenses to microbreweries, we will see about 7-8 microbreweries starting to serve fresh beers in the capital, soon after Lok Sabha election. India’s beer market, though is still ruled by strong larger (comprising nearly 65 percent of India’s beer market) but new beer styles like IPA, Stout, Hefeweisen or Belgian Trippel are much in demand now, across urban India. Craft beers are here to flow in India and their frothy waves are bound to go stronger each year. Let us say Cheers to this happy trend!