By Rohan Rehani, Co-founder, Moonshine Meadery
Mead is an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey. To draw parallels, just like beer is made by fermenting barley, and wine is made by fermenting grapes, Mead is made by fermenting honey.
Mankind has consumed meads for much longer than we’ve consumed beers or wines – predominantly because both barley and grapes require agrarian practices, which would have been missing from the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Interestingly, meads have existed in every culture independently of each other. Unlike a lot of ‘technologies’ of the ancient world, the knowledge of honey fermentation was discovered independently by most civilizations. There have been traces of mead found in ancient Chinese pottery dating back to 7000 BC and in the tomb of King Tut in Egypt. The ancient Greeks knew it as Ambrosia – the nectar of the gods. The Vikings drank it before battle, and mead (Tej) is still widely consumed in Ethiopia. Circling back to our subcontinent, meads have been mentioned in Rigveda.
The word Mead itself is a derivative of the Sanskrit word – Madhu.
Meads in contemporary India
World over, meads have started to see a resurgence with meaderies being established at a frenetic pace worldwide. In 2017, meads were the fastest-growing craft alcoholic sector in the American markets.
In India, a change in regulations to the Wine Policy of the state of Maharashtra in 2017 allowed the fermentation of honey (earlier reserved only for fruits and grapes) into mead. In 2018, the first commercial bottled meads were released in India by Moonshine Meadery.
Interestingly, world over, most meads are made like wines – 10- 13% alc, still, and packaged in a wine bottle. In India, Moonshine made their meads at 6.5% alc, carbonated and packaged in a quintessential beer bottle, firmly positioning their meads as a competitor to beer, rather than wine.
Over the last few years, other meaderies – Cerana, NoLabel, and Stump, have also launched their offerings with similar packaging and alcohol content, further establishing meads in India as uniquely different from the wine-like meads the rest of the world currently consumes.
While Cerana and Hill Zill wines have both launched higher alcohol by volume (ABV) meads in recent years – Yule Spice and Arka respectively – packaged in a wine bottle, more than 99 per cent of all meads sold in India are competing with the beer and Ready To Drink segments.
The reasons for this are quite clear – the consumption of wines in India is a fraction of the consumption of beer. Adding to this fact is that the taxation structure on meads in the initial days was very different, and a lot more than the taxation on grape and fruit wines, making competing in that category further difficult. Furthermore, the Indian subcontinent has warm and tropical climes. Chilled and carbonated beverages which can quench the thirst of heat will always do very well. One can further see this trend in the increase in wine cooler sales in India.
Positioned as it is against beers, Meads in India is a rapidly growing market, taking volume away from commercial beers.
For decades, the commercial beer industry has done a disservice to Indian consumers by offering only 1 style of beer. Each brand innovated within very narrow confines of what is possible to brew, and generation after generation of Indians have ‘acquired’ the taste for a bitter, rather flavorless beverage.
Contrast that to what are the non-alcoholic beverages we’ve consumed over the decades – from sherbets whose ingredients change from region to region, nimbu paani with chaat masala, and more recently carbonated colas.
There’s one common trend that emerges – we like flavourful beverages. And yet, when it came to beers, we were told – ‘aadat lag jayegi – it’s an acquired taste.
Which is why when the Craft Beer revolution came to India in the early 2010’s, it changed the perception of beer for a lot of us. I personally went from disliking beer, to enjoying the occasional Belgian wit and even some of the previously unapproachable styles like IPAs.
Today, the consumption patterns in a microbrewery speak volumes.
~35 per cent of the production and consumption are wheat beers, which are slightly sweeter, more flavourful and are less bitter. The next ~35 per cent are ciders and meads, and the balance ~30 per cent comprises all the other styles of beers.
Once again, non-bitter and flavourful beverages rule the roost.
Consumer markets are filled with examples of brands that shook up the status quo by innovating for a market that’s been ready for innovation.
Bira is a great example of this – back in 2014, in a world full of bitter lagers, Bira’s wheat beers made quite a splash!
This is why in 2019, when Kingfisher launched its first wheat beer, some of us further rejoiced. It’s a sign of positive change for the consumers when the largest player in the industry releases something new to capture market share they’re losing to craft players.
All of this bodes well for the mead industry – we’re all producing meads which are flavourful, gluten-free and made with natural ingredients.
The consumer’s choices are evolving in response to what’s available to the consumer, and meads are well positioned to be the beverage of choice for a large number of consumers who want to have a flavourful beverage, without feeling bloated.
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