India: Honey, We Made Mead

From spiritz.in

Mead isn’t merely a beverage business; it’s a personal exploration of flavour, fermentation and the limitless possibilities of craft, says AMAR Shrivastav, Co-Founder, HIK! Craft Meads 

Once an ancient drink, mead is finding a new audience in India. The beverage is being given a distinctly contemporary identity, with brewer-turned-mead-maker AMAR Shrivastava experimenting with honey, fruits and fermentation. Through HIK! Craft Meads, the mead maverick, Amar is helping create a culture of curiosity around a category that is still waiting to find its place on India’s drinking map, writes Bishan Kumar.

There are drinks that announce themselves with swagger, and then there are drinks that invite curiosity. Mead belongs firmly to the latter category. Made from fermented honey, mead has an ancient pedigree, yet in contemporary India it remains an intriguing newcomer: one that is slowly finding its way into the glasses of consumers looking for something other than the familiar beer, wine and other spirits. In Pune, Amar is betting on that curiosity

For Amar, mead isn’t merely a beverage business; it’s a personal exploration of flavour, fermentation and the limitless possibilities of craft. His meadery, HIK! Craft Meads, represents the meeting point of science and imagination: honey forms the foundation, fermentation gives it character, while fruits, herbs and unconventional combinations provide the element of surprise.

 Curiosity built a brand

When he was young, Amar heard about a wine-taster; but he couldn’t fathom how “a beverage could have so much depth that studying, evaluating and creating it could become someone’s profession.”

That question would eventually become a career. As his professional life drew him to breweries, microbreweries, wineries and different forms of fermentation, he was presented with a front row view of the craft beverage revolution. That sparked a desire to explore the unknown.

“I began to feel that I wanted to explore something beyond what was already established,” he recalls. “In many traditional beer styles, there are defined parameters and guidelines. There is definitely room for creativity, but I wanted to work in a space where we could experiment more freely with ingredients, flavours and processes,” he adds.

Moving towards mead

HIK! Craft Meads was created in 2022 by Amar, along with his partner Hemant Jadhav. They had known each other for years, having been in the microbrewery industry — their shared passion for the craft becoming the foundation for HIK! — the first product being a Mango Mead produced in July 2023.

Since then, Guava, Blueberry, and Cherry Cola have emerged among the flavours consumers can encounter on tap; the wider mead range includes Belgian, Hopped, Lychee, Hazelnut Coffee, Jamun, Peach and Pineapple flavours. The brand has also ventured into stronger expressions, including its 10 per cent Karwanda Mead. More recently, Jamun Mint Mead has added another distinctly Indian twist to the portfolio.

For Amar, however, the point is not to assemble a fixed list of flavours and reproduce them indefinitely. His Meadery’s philosophy is deliberately fluid. “The philosophy behind HIK! is actually very simple. The product has to come first,” he says. “We don’t create something just because putting a new flavour out there sounds exciting. If we make something, it has to be something that we believe in,” he asserts.

There is also a more personal test. “If we cannot enjoy drinking it ourselves, it shouldn’t go out to the consumer,” Amar says. That attitude explains why he is reluctant to describe even the brand’s more popular expressions as permanently fixed. “The idea is not to create a fixed portfolio and keep making the same products forever. If tomorrow we feel like there is something more interesting to work on, we should be able to stop making one flavour and start creating something completely different,” Amar elaborates.

Making Mead an experience

HIK! has moved beyond simply selling a beverage to building occasions around it. Its flagship initiative, HIK! Fest is positioned as India’s first mead festival that offered consumers an immersive way to discover the category firsthand.

The brand has also launched the HIK! Experience Centre, debuting at Chug Biergarten in Pune’s Koregaon Park. The inaugural event brought together a Mead 101 session with Amar, a cocktail session with Vins on Tap, Mead Games, and a live performance by Sabali; it’s a format being rolled out to other outlets where HIK! meads are poured.

Then there is HIK!Nik!, an experience that would invite consumers into the meadery itself & closer to the craft behind the drink.

Where honey meets science

For Amar, quality begins at source. He, however, guards his honey sources with fervour. According to him, a good mead requires a lot more than mixing honey with water and waiting for fermentation to happen — his biotechnology background, combined with his experience in brewing, gives him a strong technical foundation to work from.

“A great mead starts with the quality of the ingredients and an understanding of what you want those ingredients to become,” he explains.

Honey, naturally, is at the heart of the process. HIK! works with some of the best honey available in the market, and for its fruit-based expressions, the team uses fresh produce to make its own fruit pulps. Fermentation typically takes around 22 to 25 days: something that Amar approaches with precision and instinct.

“Fermentation is not just about following a timeline. It is about understanding how the ingredients behave, how the flavours develop and how everything comes together,” he shares.

That same rigour shapes how HIK! approaches experimentation. Every new ingredient must earn its place — surviving fermentation, integrating with the drink, and contributing something meaningful to the final flavour. “The real challenge is understanding whether that ingredient actually works in the product, how it behaves through fermentation and whether the final drink is something people would genuinely enjoy,” he says.

Teaching India to taste Mead

The biggest challenge for any mead maker in India is building familiarity. According to Amar, consumers are accustomed to thinking in established categories: beer, wine and spirits, all occupy their own clearly understood territory. Mead, however, leaves the drinker wondering where exactly it belongs.

Amar would rather not force it into any category. “For me, the simplest answer is that it should be experienced for what it is,” he says.

The solution is not technical explanations but a recognisable starting point. A Guava Mead, for instance, uses a known flavour to open the door to an unfamiliar beverage. “They know guava. It is familiar to them. Our job is to take that familiarity and use it as a way to introduce consumers to something new,” Amar says.

And then comes the most convincing form of education: tasting. “At the end of the day, you can tell someone a lot about mead. But I think the best way to introduce them to it is to let them try a good one.”

That approach has helped HIK! attract a surprisingly diverse audience. Amar broadly places HIK!’s consumers falls in the 21–45 age group: social and outgoing, willing to experiment and explore beyond their usual beer or wine.

Can Mead become mainstream?

Amar believes it can, but not overnight. He draws the parallel with India’s microbrewery movement. When he entered that industry, microbreweries were still relatively new to Indian consumers, he says, but now they are an established part of the country’s urban craft-beverage landscape. “I believe mead has a similar opportunity,” he says.

However, he believes that the category must grow on the strength of the liquid. “You can introduce consumers to a category through branding and storytelling, but ultimately they have to enjoy what is in the glass,” he points out.

Quality and consistency will be non-negotiable as HIK! grows — organically, and on its own terms rather than in a race for scale. Consumer feedback stays central. “The category has to earn its place in the market,” Amar says.

https://spiritz.in/stories/honey-we-made-mead-12543646