FOOD/ BEER SPECIAL..... Getting a head

 BEER Getting a head

Mango or paan beer, anyone? Indian beer hobbyists are not just brewing pints at home, they're giving it a desi touch Brewers have had hits and misses. 

Sameer Madan remembers his first batch -"It was the worst and left my father, who tried it, very sleepy even though the alcohol content wasn't very high"

On May 16, as the election results were announced, Pune-based Sameer Madan cracked open a bottle of beer. Nothing exceptional about that except that it wasn’t just any beer but a bottle of the latest batch of his own home-brewed beer — a mango ale with the aroma and flavour of that king of fruits, the Alphonso.

In a country where it’s difficult to lay your hands on any of the ingredients to home-brew beer and where the only choice when it comes to beer is largely lager, a bunch of home brewers are going against the grain and brewing various beers from stouts and ales to wheat beers and dunkels.

Mumbai-based Navin Mittal went from being a beer drinker to a beer buff while living in the US.

After coming back home, he told people, as every Indian does, to bring back alcohol from trips abroad. Only he didn’t want an expensive single malt or a triple distilled vodka, but a six-pack. But there’s only so long that you can make a six-pack last, and one fine day as he was having a drink, he decided to look up home brewing.

“I was surprised at the amount of information on the web,” says Mittal. It took some doing to source the ingredients etc but he finally managed to make his own. “The first one was pretty decent,” he says. “I couldn’t believe I had created beer.

I opened the bottle, it had head and fizz… oh my god… that’s when I got hooked.” An impatient brewer, he kept checking on his second batch so much so that it got infected, but since then there’s been no looking back and he has brewed about 150 batches to date. Though brewing

has taught him patience, he does keep trying the brew so that sometimes by the time it is prime, as the adage goes, `when beer is the best, the home brewer has none.' Not so with Delhi-based musician Garreth D'Mello whose interest was sparked off when his girlfriend, aware of his passion for alcohol, gifted him a book on home brewing. “I read it more than any textbook I've ever read. By the time I started brewing I knew most of the book by heart,“ says D'Mello, 35, who still has a couple of pints left from each of the batches he has brewed, an ale and a stout, but “now that I know it's happening, I'm not rationing it so carefully .“

It's a challenging hobby, not just because of the technicalities involved, but also because India lacks a home brew culture and brew shops where one can pick up equipment and ingredients. Bangalorebased consultant Archit Agrawal says his first shopping expedition yielded nothing. “We didn't get anything except baker's yeast which was useless to us,“ he says with a laugh.

If some brewers here have understood the alchemy of alcohol, some of the credit goes to 40-yearold Mittal, who blogged about his experiences and experiments on indianbeergeek.com. He wrote in detail about the equipment one needs, how to DIY it and exactly where to source ingredients. The hops and yeast have to be imported though grain can be sourced from Gurgaon.

“The yeast can be reused, I take a portion and keep it aside,” says Chennai-based Harsh Bansal, who had a few failed batches initially until he figured out the processes with a little help from Mittal. He now brews almost every week.

They’ve all had their share of hits and misses. Madan, who has so far brewed about 15 batches of beer, among them the German style Hefeweizen, Irish ale, American Amber ale and, of course, the latest mango one, remembers his first batch. “It was the worst and left my father, who tried it, very sleepy even though the alcohol content wasn’t very high.” “But even my crappiest beer would be better than the packaged beer available,” adds Bansal. And once you’ve got the equipment in place, probably cheaper too. “My first batch, a simple ale, cost me about Rs 100 a pint, far cheaper than an imported ale,” says D’Mello.

Some brewers have moved on from simpler brews to customizing, tweaking and flavouring to go local and seasonal. Prateeksh Mehra’s paan brew with betel leaves from his own back garden has turned out “a brilliant, brilliant beer”. “It was a refreshing beer, it opens up in the mouth with the soft notes of gulkand and supari,” says the commercial photographer whose pints don’t last very long, especially if he has a party. Friends of Delhi-based Hanumant Sakhuja, who did a course in the UK and brews regularly, don’t buy lager since he brings his beer along to parties.

Besides the house parties, brewing throws open opportunities to exchange notes and brews. “It’s a community of like-minded people who share the same philosophies in life,” says Aurelia Bhoy, 24, who did her Masters in brewing and distilling in the UK and is now a brewer at The Brew Pub in Pune.

She and Mittal, who quit his job at a website, and with partners Rahul Mehra and Krishna Naik set up the Gateway Brewing Company that currently offers its craft beer at seven bars in Mumbai, may brew professionally but they remain enthusiastic home brewers. “It’s so stress-busting, you forget your worries,” says Mittal. “Besides, I can’t ask a microbrewery to brew 10-20 litres of a beer just because I want to have it,” says Bhoy, who wants to do a mango beer too. “It’s about learning and having your own signature. Home brewing is so much fun, and at the end of it you get beer. It’s a win-win situation.”
Monica Bathija TOI 140525