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Honeyed tones: India is having a mead moment
It's the oldest alcoholic drink known to humans. It faded in the industrial age. Mead is now making a comeback, as ‘small batch’ and ‘craft’ become USPs again.
What even is mead? The flavourful alcoholic beverage is made by fermenting honeyed water with fruit and, often, spices.
For most Indians, it has been the stuff of literary fantasy, popping up in Asterix comics, then at The Three Broomsticks in Hogsmeade, the village of wizards near Harry Potter’s school of magic.
In the real world, mead is the oldest alcoholic beverage known to humans.
The earliest evidence of a drink made from fermented fruit and honey dates to about 6,500 BCE China, with traces found in Neolithic pottery. (The earliest traces of wine and beer, incidentally, date to centuries later, about 6000 BCE and 4000 BCE respectively, and coincide with the spread of settled living and agriculture.)
In India, earliest recorded mentions of a mead-like beverage are in the Rigveda, whose verses are traceable to at least 1500 BCE.
Wine and beer have persisted but, around the world, mead fell out of favour in the 18th century, amid the dawn of the industrial revolution — likely because brewing the first two was easier and more cost-effective on an industrial scale.
Now, the market is once again altering the fate of the honeyed tipple. In a fragmented industry where “small batch”, “micro” and “craft” have come full circle, to become unique selling points, mead is making a comeback.
Around the world, the revival can be traced through the past decade, with meaderies coming up across the US in much the same way that beer breweries were then mushrooming across Bengaluru.
Domestically, the shift can be traced to 2017, and the setting up of Moonshine Meadery in Pune, the first mead company in modern India.
“Early conversations were tough,” says Rohan Rehani, co-founder with Nitin Vishwas. “They would go something like this: ‘Hey, would you like to try this mead?’ ‘What’s mead?’ ‘It’s an alcohol made from honey.’ ‘Must be super sweet.’ ‘No, it’s really not. Please taste it.’ ‘Oh… that’s pretty good.’”
What made things tougher was that, legally, mead did not exist. Honey-based alcohol was not an excise category, so licencing was a tangle. Rehani lobbied with Maharashtra’s excise department for 18 months before the company received its licence in 2017.
There were soon more entrants to the fray. In 2018, fruit-wine manufacturers Hill Zill introduced Arkä in Maharashtra. Cerana Meads began distribution in Nashik and Mumbai in 2020. The following year, Delhi-based No Label and Karnataka-based Stump hit local markets (it took founder Himavanth Hasaganur Jayanth protracted lobbying to have the category listed in that state). The bistro Nho Saigon in Mumbai began serving its own craft meads on tap the same year.
Flavours, across brands, include options such as coffee, apple cider, jamun, hibiscus, pomegranate-vanilla, passion fruit and rose. Prices range from ₹180 and ₹1,000 for a pint.
SWEET SUCCESS
It all started, for Moonshine, with a story from overseas. Vishwas, then a consultant with McKinsey, was on an international flight in 2014 when he saw a story in an in-flight magazine about the growing interest in this beverage.
Intrigued, he and Rehani, a childhood friend (they’re both 39 and have known each other for 30 years), began experimenting, testing tiny batches on family and friends. Then Vishwas’s wife Viveki Pasta brought a few bottles back from the US.
“We tasted those and they were so much better than what we were churning out,” says Rehani, laughing. He decided to travel to the US, for groundwork and hands-on experience, and volunteered briefly with a meadery there.
Back home, the two men knew that beer dominates the Indian alcohol market. The latest data from Statista indicates that 32% of Indian alcohol drinkers prefer beer, followed by wine (22%) and whiskey (14%). But Indians are also known to like sweet, carbonated beverages, and even mix these with whiskey.
Moonshine set out to bridge this gap, offering a relatively mild, slightly sweet alcoholic beverage, aimed at people who didn’t really like the sharpness of alcohol.
By the end of its first year, Rehani says, Moonshine was available at over 150 locations (stores, cafés and bars) across Mumbai and Pune. Six years in, the brand is now available at about 1,000 sites across Maharashtra, Karnataka, Goa and Haryana.
Growth is being reported by the other entrants too. “We plan to expand manufacturing capacity from 20,000 litres to 1 lakh litres a month,” says Jayanth, 28, of Stump.
Hill Zill’s Arkä has spent the past year expanding its presence across Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka and Arunachal Pradesh.
“Mead is an ancient tradition in India. Our brand is named after one such drink mentioned in Indian scriptures dating to 1700 BCE,” says Hill Zill’s Priyanka Save, 38, co-founder with Nagesh Pai, 38. “In heavy rain, it is said that beehives got saturated with water and could be squeezed into a bag, the honeyed mix then fermented and consumed as arkä.”
Mead has a smaller carbon footprint as well, Save adds. “It uses less water than beer, no grains or hops, needn’t be boiled, and increases the value of fruits, which are grown in abundance in India and are susceptible to spoilage. This constitutes an agricultural benefit.”
Indians may never become primarily mead drinkers, but the taste for it is growing, says culinary anthropologist Kurush Dalal. “In my observation, it is doing better than ciders ever did in India,” he says. “It is easy to make, can be flavoured beautifully, and though Indians didn’t drink cider, we did take to apple-cider beer, which is also a preferred flavour among mead-drinkers.”
