As India’s first meadery opens, we find out why mead isn’t just fermented honey and water, and how the country got a new liquor category
For those of us who have heard of mead, it has always been that elusive drink we’ve read about in the pages of Beowulf or imagined being toasted in the halls of Valhalla. Ambrosia, Heaven’s Dew or the Drink of the Gods, or by any other name, it was a thing of lore forgotten by time. Well, almost.
The last decade has seen the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage stage a comeback. In the US, mead is currently the fastest-growing alcoholic category, a statistic that seems to have ruffled a few feathers, including that of big bird, Budweiser, which mocked it in one of its recent advertisements. In 2003, the US had about 30 commercial meaderies; today, there are more than 350! 2017 mead reports estimate that in the States a new meadery opens every three days. When it comes to the rest of the world, that figure changes to one every seven days.
On home turf, we have Rohan Rehani and Nitin V to thank for drawing this honey ferment out of the make-believe world of dungeons and dragons, and bringing it to our neighbourhood bars. That is, if your neighbourhood happens to be Mumbai or Pune.
Nitin and I first connected when a common craft-brewer friend put us in touch. We later met at a mall during one of his trips to Delhi — he’d carried a sample of his mead, which we sneakily tasted in a Starbucks takeaway cup. That was two years ago. Four weeks ago, Moonshine Meadery, based in Maharashtra, officially became India’s first meadery.
The two 33-year-olds, both mechanical engineers by education, have been close friends for over three decades. In 2014, Nitin had read about meads in an in-flight magazine while travelling from Brussels to Munich. “I took pictures of the article and sent them to Rohan as soon as I landed. Within two weeks, he had bought honey, a carbouy and wine yeast to begin fermentation,” he says. “We had no reference point; it was all about the concept and the excitement of tinkering with brewing. Our first batch was the absolute worst, as we didn’t know anything about temperature control.”
Batch by batch their meads got better as they figured out what they were doing wrong. They started to employ modern fermentation techniques and improve their equipment. Then they experimented with every fruit and spice they could get their hands on, including gooseberries, cloves, mulberries, cinnamon, apples, mangoes, etc. They also played with varieties of honey. “We used multiflora / wildflower honey for meads which have a strong fruit or spice character. For milder, traditional meads, the type of honey fermented imparts the character,” says Rehani, who, during this journey, pursued special courses on bee keeping (from the Central Bee Keeping and Training Institute, Pune) and later, interned with Colony Meadery in Pennsylvania. By late 2015, Rohan and Nitin knew they wanted to set up a meadery.
Millennial toast
The Moonshine duo was aware that obtaining licenses would be troublesome. It’s hard enough for a new player in an established space, but it’s another battle to get one for a category that isn’t recognised by Indian law. Beginning the process in January 2016, multiple rounds of research and bureaucratic back-and-forth finally got it included in the excise legislation. This June, Maharashtra became the first (and currently, only) state to formally recognise mead as a category under wine.
Internationally, the mead boom is largely credited to piqued interests among the Game of Thrones fandom. Ironic, considering the drink has never (yet) made an appearance on the show. While pop-culture references have made the term more common, the popularity of ‘craft beverages’, beer in particular, is what Moonshine Meadery is counting on to drive interest and sales. “Both craft beer and mead are about quality, innovation and small-batch productions. Meads are where craft beer was 20 years ago,” says Rehani. Also, as Nitin adds, “Millennials are experimenting more with their alcohol. This has resulted in a growth in cocktails and innovative alcohol beverages.”
Along with trying new recipes, provenance of raw materials is key. Being a homegrown product, they use all natural, locally-sourced ingredients. Their first bottled variants are an Apple Cyder Mead, which uses honey from Maharashtra’s Western Ghats with Kashmiri apple juice, and a Coffee Mead, with coffee from Chikmagalur.
Testing waters
Educating the market is one of the most important things Moonshine will have to tackle. Shailendra Bist, head brewer at Independence Brewing Company, says, “Drawing parallels to cider, a product that is currently much better known, is perhaps the best way to start.” One of the criticisms they are likely to come up against is that mead is a ‘sweet, woman’s drink’. “For us, it invokes the imagery of Vikings throwing back a drinking horn full of mead before charging into battle. That’s as manly as it can get! It’s up to meaderies like us to decide what the perception will be in five years,” Nitin adds.
So far Moonshine Meadery has done a few collaborative brews with breweries in Pune and Mumbai, which have found instant appeal even with first-timers. Most recently, at the Octobrew fest in Nashik — where the meads were exhibited alongside other craft brews — they managed to go through an impressive 217 litres in just six hours! “Everyone approaches it with curiosity. Once they try it, they are bowled over by how refreshing and balanced it is. We expected our Apple Cyder Mead to be popular, but we’ve been astonished by the love for our Coffee Mead,” says Nitin.
By mid-November, restaurants and a few select outlets will retail Moonshine Meadery’s bottles (at ₹180 for 330 ml). The plan is to expand to all major cities within the next two years. “We want to make this a national brand. We will have multiple variants and we will continue to experiment,” he concludes.
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