Tired of lager? Perhaps you could make your own beer at home, like this small community of Indians



‘Ever since man became sapient he has devised means of intoxicating himself’

—A History of Beer and Brewing by Ian Spencer Hornsey

As the story goes, during the time of the British Empire, their soldiers and merchants in India faced a peculiar problem. All the beer shipped from Britain arrived flat, musty and sour, since the long, hot ocean journey to India—lasting several months—ensured that the beer did not stay too well.

Since beer could not be produced in India’s hot climate, English brewers attempted various solutions. One of these even involved making freshly-made beer go flat by uncorking the bottles, re-corking them later when they were loaded on board India-bound ships. The belief was that the ship’s rocking motion would enable the beer to achieve a second carbonation— and with that, retain its taste. This was not successful.

This issue continued to vex the British until a brewery in East London, Bow Brewery, came up with a new beer. It took the recipe of the pale ale—a light-coloured drink compared to the darker ales of that period—and added to it large amounts of hop (which gives beer its bitter quality), and extra grain and sugar as well. The brewery found that the high alcohol content and large quantities of hops protected the beer from souring. The result was an incredibly strong, bitter, alcoholic pale ale that could withstand the rigours of the journey to India; and also, one that tasted like no other. The Indian Pale Ale (IPA), as it came to be called, turned out to be a rage not just in India but in Europe as well, becoming, as some historians claim, the first global beer.

All these years later, despite this country’s role in the development of one of the most celebrated types of beer, and even with advancements in refrigeration and brewing, almost every beer produced in India is a uniform-tasting bland lager. Even as wine becomes more popular in India, with people consuming both international and domestic vintages, most beer in the country is either Kingfisher, Haywards, Budweiser or Cobra. Nothing but a bland beer, always out of a bottle, rarely from a tap, treated with glycerine to preserve it, and with little to distinguish the taste of one from another.

But, if you turn up at Navin Mittal’s home in Mumbai, he can fix you something entirely different. He can offer you a mean IP as strong as the one prepared back in the nineteenth century. Or he can even fix you something more experimental, say, a paan or cardamom beer. Mittal, who describes himself as a beer geek, is the sort of person you would expect drinking good craft beer, imported from halfway around the globe. But what this former head of Shaadi.com’s networking site, Fropper, is doing, is brewing the beer himself. He is part of a growing group of home-brewers in the country that is too small to be termed a subculture but too passionate to be dismissed as faddists. Every few weeks, either with friends or alone, he will brew anywhere between five and 10 litres of various types of beer in his kitchen, which will last him for a week or so. “Brewing is cooking,” Mittal says, “but with different utensils. The end product is like food, but it will leave you a little high.”

The home-brewing community in India owes its origin to the internet. While micro-brewing and home-brewing is quite popular in Europe and the US, with easily available DIY kits, ingredients and equipment, in India most home- brewers have learned their craft online. Mittal, perhaps one of the earliest to begin in India, has been brewing beer since 2006. He sourced various ingredients and equipment online, purchased a new refrigerator and had it tweaked so that he could control its temperature, and every weekend when his kitchen was not being used (or his family was away), he would learn and try to perfect his craft. “The blasted thing was, I couldn’t share it with anyone,” he says. “There was no one to tell me if the beers tasted alright. Nobody among my friends or family was enthused. But I enjoyed the process. I liked the taste of my beers and they were far cheaper than the ones available. So I carried on.” Three years ago, he even travelled to the UK to enhance his skills by attending a three-week long course at Brewlab, which runs programmes on this craft.

Mittal then began blogging about his experiments with home-brewing, as Indian Beer Geek, which brought together people from Mumbai—as well as other cities like Delhi, Bangalore and Pune— who were also trying out or wanted to learn home-brewing. “We started meeting up, sharing notes as we made our beers, and soon enough we realised we had come [up] with an enthusiastic group of home-brewers.”

Unlike the West, where you can easily dispense with various tricky steps—for instance, by using readymade ‘wort’ (available commercially), which is dissolved in boiling water, mixed with yeast, and allowed to ferment—home- brewers here start from scratch. Mittal and his group source barley malt from a factory in Gurgaon, which distributes most of its grain to alcohol manufacturers and health-drink creators. For hops and yeast, they either place an order or ask friends and relatives travelling to the West to purchase it for them. The brewers then grind and boil the barley malts to create a liquid called ‘mash’. When the malt is being boiled, hops are added to make the liquid bitter. To this liquid— called ‘wort’ after straining—yeast is added, and the liquid is set aside for at least 10 days in air-tight utensils to ferment.

Lenin D’Costa, a software engineer in Mumbai who has been brewing for over two years, says, “Initially when I began, I didn’t know how to source the ingredients. I used to grind and boil Horlicks, thinking that since it was made from barley malt it could be used as a supplement. I followed all the steps, but within a week of fermentation, it started to stink.” As he began to meet other home brewers, he started improving his beers. He now brews late on Saturday nights or early on Sundays when the kitchen is not being used. He says, “When a batch is good, I store it. When it is poor, I throw a party.”

The debate about whether home- brewed beer in India is superior to that available commercially is also largely a debate over ales and lagers. Lagers are lighter beers, fermented over longer periods and in colder climates than compared to ales. Most of India’s home-brewers are real ale fundamentalists who decry the fact that millions of dollars have been pumped into showing how ‘cool’ and ‘great’ lager is. When I meet Mittal, dressed in a white formal shirt and cream pants, in his first floor office in South Mumbai’s Chira Bazaar, he asks me, “Do you know why you drink any of those mass-produced lagers chilled?” His answer comes accompanied with the corners of his mouth forming a beatific smile. “Because the cold numbs your taste buds and you don’t realise the depressing truth—that you are drinking shit,” he says. “But real ale is different. Every sip provides an explosion of tastes.”

However, home brewing isn’t an easy task. Apart from half a day of boiling and stirring large vats of strange mixtures, using equipment like refractometers to measure the sugar content—as you consider the future of what will perhaps turn to beer—a large part of brewing is also spending several thankless hours doing mundane chores like boiling water and using it along with chlorine-based bleaches to clean utensils. A little mistake, a few invisible bacteria not cleaned away thoroughly enough, and an entire batch can get ruined. “Just imagine,” says Pankil Shah, co-founder of Neighbourhood Hospitality, a company that runs a number of restaurants, “all that work, 10 days or more of waiting and you end up with something non-drinkable.” Shah brews his beer with some of his friends over weekends. “My first few beers, like, I guess, all first home-brewed beers, were smelly and awful. But then, if you are patient, you improve quickly. I think there’s a lot of mystery to brewing. But if you stick with it, you can easily learn,” he says.

Pateeksh Mehra, a 30-year-old photographer living in a bungalow on Mira Road, a distant Mumbai suburb, converted the 700 sq ft basement of his bungalow into a small brewery. Over the last few months, he has begun to make cheese, and part of this space is now used for that. He says, “Beers should be, at least, fermented for 10 days. In India, most of the beers are hardly kept for five days. My beer is smoother, tastier and probably also has health benefits,” he says. His says that his favourite beer is his paan beer, made by adding betel leaves (that he grows outside his bungalow) to the fermenting liquid. “The possibilities are endless,” he says. “With just a few weeks and a little effort, you can brew any kind of beer imaginable. An IPA? No sweat. A paan beer? Sure. Something stronger? Of course.”

A year ago, Mittal and two other home- brewers, Rahul Mehra and Krishna Naik, took their passion a step further. They started a microbrewery, Gateway Brewing Company, and started supplying their ales to select pubs and restaurants in Mumbai. Mehra says, “Everyone [among our friends] loved what we made. So, we thought, ‘Why not take it to the next level?’”

The task of setting up a microbrewery, coupled with the fact that his house is undergoing a renovation, has ensured that Mittal hasn’t brewed in over two months. He says, however, that he is itching to get back to it. “When we brew, the kitchen is a huge mess. Water and smells all over. Equipment lying everywhere. To many, it would perhaps seem like a waste of time. But I think what keeps us home brewers going is that there’s a certain mystery to making your own beer. And all of us in a way are trying to solve that mystery.”