Fermented coconut and cashew fruit: the ancient spirits fuelling India’s craft alcohol boom

Sheltered in the shade of a mango tree entwined with peppercorn vines, a vast clay pot sits on top of a fire, its lid sealed tight with mud. Distilling within is India’s oldest alcoholic spirit, said to date back almost 500 years. This spirit, known as feni, was the liquor that lubricated life here in India’s small, verdant state of Goa for centuries; sipped gently in the evenings, uproariously knocked back at festivals, and given as a medicinal pick-me-up for aches and fevers. While a potent, locally brewed jar – made either from coconut wine freshly tapped from palm trees or fermented cashew fruit – could be found in almost every Goan home, it was never drunk outside state borders. For a decade, Hansel Vaz, a geologist turned second-generation Goan feni maker, has been crafting his premium brand Cazulo at this 100-year-old distillery in south Goa. It has long been rebuffed as a lowly village tipple, but the feni tides are finally turning, a trend Vaz sees as part of a sweeping transformation of India’s market for alcoholic spirits. “This is the last spirit left in the world that’s not industrialised at all. It’s completely unique, sustainable and distinctive to India,” says Vaz, who is known to many as the “feni doctor”. “If this was a white guy making this in Europe, there would be a line 3km long outside my distillery.” For a long time, India had a highly conservative attitude towards alcohol. Drinking was mostly done at home and most of the spirits consumed were little more than ethanol infused with colour and flavours to mimic whisky, gin or vodka, and then sold cheaply for 100 to 200 rupees (about £1 to £2). More discerning drinkers chose either imported scotch whisky or the molasses-sweet Old Monk rum, which for decades was the biggest-selling Indian-made liquor brand. In south India there has also long been a penchant for a sweet brandy or the rougher toddy, made from the fermented alcoholic sap of coconut trees. Foreign brands often stayed away, put off by the prohibitive laws, sky-high taxes, complex excise regulation – which varies state by state – and the small pool of those with a disposable income. But in the past few years, a craft alcohol frenzy has gripped India, where homegrown gins, whiskys, rums and agave spirits have sprung up in abundance, changing the palates of young Indian drinkers and garnering international acclaim. From the first Indian craft gin emerging in 2017, there are now almost 100 different homegrown varieties, many of which harness Indian botanicals, including juniper grown in the Himalayas and various Indian spices and herbs. As a result, gin has come to be regarded as the most popular spirit among India’s young urban drinkers, both men and women, who frequent the burgeoning number of cocktail bars. “When I opened my first bar in 2012, the concept of a craft cocktail was whisky, half-soda, half-water,” said Rakshay Dhariwal, who opened Delhi’s first cocktail bar and owns a string of restaurants, and launched his own craft tequila-style agave spirit called Pistola. “Today, the craft brand revolution has really helped push the envelope. This younger generation of drinkers are so different to the previous generation, they no longer want to drink spirits that are manufactured and mass produced.” ‘We want to have our individuality’ India is the fastest-growing alcohol market in the world, worth more than $54bn (£43.5bn). While Indian-made beer has been drunk for more than a century, and the domestic wine industry is well established, most of the growth is being driven by spirits; more whisky, rum and brandy is sold in the country than anywhere else globally. Over the past two years, particularly since the start of the Covid pandemic, the biggest jump has been in the premium sector, particularly tequila, which is now the favoured drink of Bollywood stars and politicians alike, and whisky, which is experiencing 61% annual growth. So lucrative is access to India’s whisky-drinking market that tariff reductions on scotch are a central part of a free trade deal being negotiated with the UK. In October, Indri, an Indian-made whisky launched in 2021, won “best in show, double gold”, the highest accolade at the whiskies of the world awards, and is now exported to 17 countries. Like many in the craft industry, the makers of Indri said various factors unique to India were part of its success. The barley used to make the malt for Indri has been grown by Rajasthani farmers for hundreds of years, differing significantly from the hybrid crop grown in Europe and the US. Due to the extreme hot and cold climate, Indian whisky is said also to mature in the barrels much faster than its Scottish counterparts. “A three-year-old whisky in India can easily be compared to a 10-year-old scotch,” said Praveen Malviya, the chief executive of Piccadily Agro Industries, which produces Indri. “The faster maturation means bolder flavours, both from the barley and also from the extraction of the flavours of the barrel during ageing. We embrace that; we want to have our individuality.” Malviya said a newfound confidence in Indian-made spirits was driving up quality and demand. “Ten years ago, people would have been shy to serve an Indian whisky at a dinner party – they would have only brought out scotch – but today they proudly bring out a bottle,” he said. Such is the boom that the world’s largest alcohol companies, including Diageo, Bacardi and Pernod Ricard, have jumped on the bandwagon, grappling with India’s complicated excise policies and high import tariffs to put India at the forefront of their Asia strategy, push their established brands, acquire Indian craft brands and establish their own Indian-made spirits and single malts. These same multinationals have come knocking on Vaz’s door, inquiring about scaling up production of feni and selling it internationally as India’s answer to popular spirits such as mezcal. Yet Vaz’s vision is to steer clear of mass production altogether, and instead preserve the craft process, while still selling it to a global market “just as the French did with cognac and armagnac”. Production of Vaz’s Cazulo feni employs a process almost identical to how it was made centuries ago, with virtually no modernisation. For the cashew feni – the only distilled spirit in the world made from cashew fruit – they still wait for the fruit to fall naturally from the tree to make sure it is fully ripe, a Goan tradition. The cashew fruit is then crushed manually in a stone basin using bare feet to get the juices out. Both the coconut toddy and cashew juice are fermented naturally underground in decades-old clay pots, with no additional yeast. The distillers use nothing but smell and sound to decide when it is ready. It is boiled twice on an open fire, and is one of the only spirits in the world distilled exactly to drinking strength, with no water added. Cazulo is aged in the traditional garrafao glass bottles that Vaz has spent years collecting. Some bottlings are aged in his feni cellar, but a special selection is being stored at the bottom of a nearby pond for two to three years – evoking an age-old Goan method of keeping feni in the well – which Vaz hopes to sell as a limited edition. Vaz believes that just as Indian-made whisky, rum and gin have become sources of national pride, “the world is also starting to wake up to feni”. Bartenders and connoisseurs from some of the world’s best bars in Tokyo, Paris, London and Taiwan have flown over to Goa for Vaz’s feni tasting sessions – where the spirit is paired with everything from apple and guava to peanuts and chocolate – and picked up bottles for their bars. For now, just 100,000 litres of Cazulo are made a year. “We could scale it up but it needs the will and an understanding of the value of what we have,” said Vaz, whose enthusiasm and belief in feni is unwavering. “There are currently only six major spirits in the world. I believe that feni could be the seventh.”