Spirited Away By India’s Single Malt Craze

In little over a decade, India has become home to over a dozen single malt brands, as big liquor distillers, including multinational corporations (MNCs) — all of which have portfolios that cover all kinds of alcoholic beverages, at every price point — rush to catch up with small, intrepid pioneers like Amrut and John distilleries for a share of the ever-expanding single malt pie. 

It is the same story with other “hard” liquors, including rum, vodka and gin. 

India has long been a “whisky-drinking” nation, the size of the market for which stood at US$ 16.9 billion in FY2024.

Within this market, the top end is of those who imbibe single malts, or the whisky produced by a single distillery. Though the Indian single malt market is nascent, it has been growing at a phenomenal rate. From 1.16 lakh cases in 2021, it more than doubled to 2.81 lakh cases in just one year, wowing customers with catch-phrases like “chill-filtered”, “triple-distilled” and “six-eared barley”, while enticing global buyers with an exotic "origin story".  

Moonshine From The Foothills 

At the home base of India’s second-largest distiller (by volume) Radico Khaitan — in Rampur in the Uttar Pradesh foothills — a small corner has been reserved for the distillation and maturation of its Rampur single malt in modern copper pot stills.

Even as towering steel column stills run giant batches of molasses, wheat and rice "washes" — depending on the agricultural procurement seasons — a smaller copper pot still hidden away at the back of the campus distills malted six-eared barley from Rajasthan, to be matured in a variety of barrels sourced from across the globe in a climate-controlled shed. 

Master blender Mukesh Sharma says their inspiration is Highland single malts — a nod to the lighter, fruity nectar of the Scottish glens. No doubt, the strategy is influenced by John Distillery’s Paul John Bold and Amrut’s Peated, which have cornered the domestic market for Islay-inspired “peaty and smoky” Indian single malts.

This surge in demand for high-end whisky has even woken the slumbering giant — Mohan Meakins — whose Old Monk brand rum has a loyal customer base that has gallantly held its own against global competitors for decades. 

In the sleepy hill town of Kasauli in Himachal Pradesh, a small mountain stream feeds a battered, nearly 170-year-old swan-neck copper still imported from Scotland by the British Army, as it continues to chug out batches of malted spirits to be matured in virgin American white oak barrels inside a cave on the hillside. 

Instead of trying to market its own brands — simply because its quirky owners abhor any form of advertising — the company had become the bulk supplier of choice for malted spirits to the MNCs, when they entered the Indian market with blended “Scotch” whisky. 

Anything Goes As IMFL

The biggies — Diageo, Beam Suntory, Pernod-Ricard, etc. — aren’t complaining. 

They simply take advantage of the grey definitions of the Indian-made foreign liquor (IMFL) category to market products containing a tiny percentage (around 1.5 per cent) of mass-produced whisky imported from Scotland, as it just qualifies them to use the oxymoronic “IMFL blended Scotch” tag. 

This goes into a slightly larger quantity of malted and aged spirit from an Indian distiller like Mohan Meakins (8-10 per cent), with 80-90 per cent of the rest being indeterminate ethyl alcohol.

But now, even Mohan Meakins has sprung to life, with its once impossible-to-obtain Solan Single Malt displayed from liquor vends along the road from Delhi to Himachal, and across the country. 

The saga of the Indian single malt is partly one where the middle class is in search for an Indian identity — for what it considers the “good things of life” — and partly forced by the high duties imposed on imported single malts (which are 150 per cent upwards). Add state excise duties, and the price shoots up further.

With the Indian alcohol market projected to grow at a CAGR of 7.5 per cent from 2024 (US$ 55.81 billion) to 2031 (US$ 92.57 billion), other local distillers are also following in the footsteps of the MNCs, by diversifying into mid-range, “bridge” whisky products — like Amrut’s MaQintosh and Beam Suntory’s Oaksmith. 

These brands offer affordable beverages with a whiff of the exotic, adding a dash of essence to the indeterminate spirits that are manufactured as IMFL (as opposed to 'country' liquor or desi daru), which covers everything from denatured industrial spirits to “beverages with foreign-sounding names”. 

Though a breakthrough in the ongoing Indo-UK FTA (free trade agreement), whose negotiations have repeatedly stalled, could lower import duties on Scotch whisky, the rise of the Indian single malt as a separate category favoured by connoisseurs both here and abroad means that this category is here to stay.