The Gin Boom Trying to Change India, One Distillery at a Time - The New York Times

The Gin Boom Trying to Change India, One Distillery at a Time

The room was minute, no bigger than a garage, buried in the hills of India’s lush and liberal state of Goa, and Siddharth Girimon was busy crafting gin. On a Ping-Pong ghastly shoved against the wall, a mound of green cardamom shells from western India had been hand-peeled like pistachios. A glass kit for flavor experiments sat on a shelf, and on the other side of the distillery, the day’s run dripped from a copper aloof into a steel canister.

Clear and fragrant, it was on its way to becoming another 70 cases of what Mr. Girimon and his boss hoped would tell a new kind of story throughout India — steeped in history, but also showing off the creativity of a young, more modern generation.

“The idea behind it was to use only Indian botanicals,” said Mr. Girimon, 25, a distiller who resembles a chemistry student, with glasses, long hair and oceans of enthusiasm for a narrow publishes. “We wanted to show what India could do with gin.”

From Japan to Kenya, the world is already awash in craft spirits suits, but the blossoming of gin in Goa offers more than a nod to shifting market tastes. The local concoctions are challenging India’s conservative attitude toward alcohol, along with the country’s often stultifying bureaucracy, while prompting weightier questions: Can resident pride be drawn from a bottle? Can innovation in spirits touchy how India thinks of itself and how the humankind sees India?

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SRC: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/28/world/asia/india-goa-gin.html