India’s alcohol market is one of the largest in the world, and overall beer sales almost doubled to ₹41,000 crore a year from 2010 to 2016. Whilst craft beer sales are estimated to represent only ₹650 crore of this overall figure, the industry is said to be growing at roughly 20% to 30% per year.
A key ingredient of this success is the ‘magic’ performed by the brewmaster in each establishment. We meet three trailblazers.
With a family history of engineering, a Commerce degree and a job as a data analyst in Chennai, Vidya Khuber would seem like an unlikely candidate for a future job as one of India’s few female brewmasters. And yet, today, Khuber is chief brewmaster at the Bengaluru-based Geist brewery, overseeing beer production in South India’s first distribution brewery in Nimbekaipura village as well as two retail microbreweries in the CBD. “It really started as a preferred beverage for me, and then I got attracted to the whole concept of beer brewing. It seemed to be a logical progression from there into a career,” she says.
To obtain appropriate qualifications, Khuber completed a two-country programme in brewing technology, involving the Siebel Institute in Chicago, US, and the Doemens Academy in Munich, Germany. “I had exposure to two different brewing cultures, and looking back, I am very happy about having done that.”
She is part of the burgeoning craft beer industry steadily establishing itself in the Indian alcoholic beverages sector. “Microbreweries” — the retail face of the industry — are springing up in major metropolitan centres across the country, with close to 90 in operation currently.
Kenyan-born Daniel Wambua is based at Hyderabad’s Prost Brew Pub. The Prost group has microbreweries in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. After winning a scholarship to learn brewing at Edinburgh University in Scotland, Wambua got his big break working in a large brewery in Istanbul, Turkey. “This is where I learnt the German styles of beer making... and where I came up to head brewer level,” he says. Wambua also gained experience working in a number of countries — the UK, Kenya, Uganda, Peru and the Pacific — before moving to India.
After working in a number of microbreweries in South India, he moved to Hyderabad in 2016, to help set up the Prost. “The main work I do with Prost is making sure the beers are good: Making sure they are running out well, taking care of all the technical issues. I have a team of 10 brewers here — they run the day-to-day routines, cleaning out the tanks and brewing lines.”
When it all began
India’s first surviving microbrewery is Doolally in Pune, which opened in August 2009. It’s brewmaster is German-born Oliver Shouf, considered a ‘veteran’ in the industry here. After studying brewing technology in Berlin, Germany, he says, “I’ve been mainly working abroad since 2000… in Finland, Russia, France, Greenland… and then I ended up in India”.
In those days, brewing small batch beer presented many challenges, not least because of the size of the industry at the time. “We had problems even getting malt from the few malthouses in India, because they were not thrilled about supplying the small amount required,” says Shouf.
Another difficulty was the Indian bureaucracy. Narayan Manepally, one of the founding co-directors of Geist, recalls “the bigger issue for us was getting the respective State governments to amend their excise laws, which were based on a 100-year-old British law.”
Brewpubs — as they are also known — usually have six to 10 different beer styles on offer — with European style wheat beers being the most popular, according to Khuber. “I think our customers find the light beers very thirst quenching and easy drinking. And probably just the freshness coming from the wheat. But beers at the pubs keep changing. We mostly have wheat beers, but also an IPA (Indian Pale Ale), a Belgian Blonde and a Stout.”
Broader horizons
But just how important is the role of the brewmaster? For Manepally, having access to the right raw materials and a great environment is not enough. “At the end of the day, the reason it’s called craft beer is because you use of your head and your hands. One of the keys to producing great beer is the management of yeast and a great brewmaster will have a handle on how to manage yeast to produce beer of a particular style.”
Since its early beginnings in India some 18 years ago, craft brewing is rapidly expanding its production base and the future’s looking bright for the industry. Khuber’s distribution brewery outside Bengaluru now produces kegs of beer in three different styles, which are distributed to more than 35 restaurants and pubs in the city.
Similarly, Schouf’s Doolally brewery in Pune now distributes kegs of their beer to nine outlets in Mumbai, known as Doolally Taprooms. And Wambua’s Prost group is looking at opening similar operations in Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and another outlet in Bengaluru.
