A buzzy new limited-edition mead helps India’s tribal honey harvesters

From cntraveller.in/story

Made with single-origin honey sourced by tribal communities in Maharashtra and Gujarat, sipping on this small-batch age-old alcohol helps India’s sustainable beekeepers 

The story behind Pune-based Moonshine Meadery is one of the most bizarre backstories of any alcohol brand in India—they legit started making this antediluvian drink because of an in-flight magazine; briefly bootlegging it out of the co-founder’s grandmother’s basement. Their penchant for the peculiar is evinced by their latest limited-edition mead in their Project X series, 1,500 bottles of mead made in collaboration with Under The Mango Tree Society, whose forest-harvested Tribal Gold honey was sourced through tribal communities in Maharashtra and Gujarat. And by drinking it, you invariably help India’s honey harvesters.

Now, you better bee-lieve that goes down smoothly for armchair activists like myself, all too happy to save the planet one sip at a time.

What is mead?

Mead is an ancient alcohol with an ABV of anywhere from four to eighteen per cent, made out of fermented honey. It’s a tipple so time honoured it features in ancient literature with the frequency Japanese whisky blends are touted in lifestyle mags today, listed everywhere from Beowulf to the Rigveda—in the latter, it is referred to as soma.

Why mead?

                                                                                                                               Moonshine Meadery

Started by childhood buddies Rohan Rehani and Nitin Vishwas, Moonshine Meadery—widely heralded as India’s first modern mead-making outfit—came to be because Vishwas picked up an in-flight magazine in 2014. “Nitin read about London’s first new meadery in the last 500 years in Lufthansa’s in-flight magazine, which left us super intrigued as we had only heard about mead in the context of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones… we knew it was a beverage that had existed, but thought it was lost to the annals of time,” says Rehani. Excited to get their hands on some, the two started calling up bottle shops across Mumbai and Bengaluru to no avail. But the realisation that mead still could be made kickstarted their curiosity in the honey-based bevy made with water and yeast, an interest that has kept on thumping to this day.

Not before long, the two were homebrewing mead in Rehani’s grandmother’s basement. “Honestly, we very nearly started a bootlegging operation that took us a couple years to transform into a full-fledged legitimate business (hence the name ‘Moonshine’) because there was no law concerning meads in the country; we actually had to go meet the Excise Minister of Maharashtra and convince the officials to change the law to allow mead to be added under the wine category.”

Beyond the legality of their homebrewing business, they were rather concerned that potential customers would write off their product as being too sweet once they found out the backbone of mead is fermented honey. So they directly went the experimental route, producing apple and coffee-forward meads versus straight-up traditional ones.

“But as our operations grew, we saw beekeepers from across the country, NGOs, and even government agencies reaching out to us (for collabs),” explains Rehani. While the duo initially turned down such partnerships, it inspired them to invest in a honey-harvesting structure for the business and experiment with honey-forward meads. Rehani even completed a course in beekeeping at the Central Bee Research and Training Institute (CBRTI) in Pune, and set up 600 beehive boxes, which are now looked after by a full-time beekeeper.

Journey of Project X

“The very first batch of Project X we released, we worked with sidr honey from our own beehives in 2021,” which won a gold medal at the European Beer Challenge in 2021. “Our sidr is a unique honey and translated into mead wonderfully with its creamy, buttery vanilla notes, almost like caramel… Project X became a way of spotlighting honey profiles beyond the super sweet stuff we find on our supermarket shelves;” their avenue to experiment with other kinds of honey after seeing a rollicking response to their nuanced nectar at international competitions and from their regular clientele.

                                                                                                            UTMT Society

“About a year ago, the founder of UTMT Society, Vijaya Pastala, gave us this Tribal Gold honey to sample, which we absolutely loved, from the concept of wild beekeeping adding supplemental income to Adivasi communities in Gujarat and Maharashtra to the unique taste that has a completely different profile to the original sidr honey Project X—plus the idea behind the original Project X was to keep on working with different honeys across India,” recalls Rehani. And it certainly holds plenty of nuances, totally distinct when compared to the profiles of other kinds of honey they have used. “This honey is very earthy, very robust, and very dark in colour… influenced by the forest flora that grows around it”—from flowers like mahua and palash to tropical trees like mango, amla, and cashew.

A planet-friendly pint

“India’s honey industry doesn’t have a production problem, it has a consumption problem,” says Rehani. “We produce so much honey that India is a net exporter of honey; I believe we’re amongst the top ten producers and exporters of honey in the world, but our per capita consumption is really, really low, around 30 grams per person, per year (in other honey producing Asian countries it is way higher; in Iran the same per capita rate is more than one kilogram.) In India, we're so used to using cane sugar that honey doesn't feature highly in our list of sweeteners… this poses an interesting challenge for the country and the beekeeping industry, especially considering global warming.”

                                                                                                            UTMT Society

As an example, Rehani references his own experiences with harvesting honey in India, “Over the last three years, due to climate change, my harvest season has halved but my production costs stay the same—so essentially the cost of my honey has doubled, but I can’t double my price and expect to keep my customers. This happens all around India,” which is why so much great small-batch single-origin honey winds up being sold to larger aggregators that degrade the honey. “We as people as a nation aren't consuming enough honey, so there is no demand and so prices for beekeepers are very low”.

But Rehani says that the dynamic completely changes when honey goes into his meadery. “I can convert one kilogram of honey into alcohol, which translates into about 15 bottles of Moonshine mead. So in one afternoon, a group of friends can finish an equivalent of honey that the same number of people would take half a year to finish. So not only does mead upvalue honey, but it also increases the rate of consumption of honey.” What makes mead even more interesting is that “it actually has a net positive impact on agriculture, because unlike cash crops like barley for beer or grapes for wine, with mead, the farmers put bees in boxes around the farmland or forests, adding supplemental income with adding needed pollinators to the food-growing farm area, making it a net positive for agriculture.”

The limited edition Tribal Gold Project X by Moonshine Meadery is only available in Mumbai and Pune at Rs250

https://www.cntraveller.in/story/a-buzzy-new-limited-edition-mead-helps-indias-tribal-honey-harvesters/